Kristen Solury | Prisms - Black & Gray on Red

Biography and Artist’s Statement 

I was born in Washington DC. At age 20 I moved to New York City where I attended Pratt Institute. I studied architecture and construction management before Auto CAD and so spent many years doing mechanical drafting by hand. I took up art more seriously (rather than a hobby) after retiring from nearly 25 years in the construction industry. I was always a drawer, using graphite and coloured pencils to create highly detailed, reality based images. But I’ve long adored the mid-century abstractionists and worked long and hard to retrain my brain to let go representational imagery for the sake of emotive, non-representative ideas. Now I want to let the colours and the shapes do the talking, and allow the viewer to make up their own minds about what they’re seeing.

My work so far has been an opportunity to use my hands trained in the rigidity of drafting for another purpose. I normally don’t use any tape or guides to produce my hard edged, colour-blocked pieces.  

My work has been largely inspired by space and the mid-century ideas about the “future perfect”.  I often aim to incorporate the classic space-age aesthetic with the era’s typical notions of shape and colour into pieces that would emote a feeling of floating in differing, intersecting planes. I employ a lot of colour blocking and colour theory in my work, but I tend to bend the rules a bit, placing unexpected resulting colours where two other colours overlap and encouraging the viewers eyes to follow shapes and lines through multiple planes. Analytical minds like mine will be trying to figure out how one shape interacts with another while others will hopefully just enjoy the feeling of floating in space, letting things happen naturally.