Katie Kratzer, Sunset Sea Spray, 2022, acrylic on raw canvas, 38 x 52 x 1.5 in

Katie Kratzer (b. 1985) is a painter based on Mercer Island, Washington. Her work explores color, instinct, and vibrational energy - compositions made from a meditative place, often with her eyes closed. Katie Kratzer works channeling source energy, releasing inhibition and allowing instinct to guide her mark-making. Her process embraces spontaneity and fluidity while exploring the relationship between intuition and composition. The result is a celebration of layered color and expressive, gestural marks, drawing inspiration from music, joy, and visceral experiences. She comes to painting through an unusual convergence. Twenty years as a professional graphic designer - brand experience for Alaska Airlines, art programming for Kaiser Permanente WA, environmental graphics for REI - gave her a deep fluency with color theory and visual communication; and work recognized with a SEGD Global Design Merit Award and an Interior Design Magazine Best of Year Finalist. She studied color under Pantone's Leatrice Eisman. And then there is synesthesia - sounds arriving as fields of amorphous color, music becoming a physical space she moves through and paints from. Dyslexia, rather than a limitation, taught her to think non-linearly, to trust what arrives intuitively over what can be reasoned through. Together these ways of perceiving the world have led her to believe that the best work doesn't come from her so much as through her - that in the right state, painting becomes less an act of making and more an act of listening. She works in action, not calculation. Occasionally the canvas itself becomes a mark - ripped, sewn, or intervened upon in the same intuitive moment as the paint, never as an afterthought. Some of her most honest work has been made in stolen hours - on the bathroom floor during a toddler's nap, at the kitchen sink while her husband took the kids out for an hour. She has three young sons, whom she includes in an evolving series, Painting with My Sons - always moved by their uninhibited marks and their complete absence of doubt. The practice has had to learn to live inside a life, not apart from it. She has come to believe that constraint is not the enemy of the work. Often, it is the work. Her paintings draw from joy, grief, motherhood, memory, and the conviction that color carries its own vibrational frequency - that a painting made from a genuine place carries that energy into whatever room it enters, into whoever lives with it. A piece changes meaning over time - as she does. She has sold and shown work through her studio practice since 2017, with commissions for residential clients and corporate environments, and auction exhibitions including the Museum of Northwest Art. Her deepest affinities are with the 9th Street women: Mitchell, Frankenthaler, Hartigan. The painters who trusted the body, the instinct, the mark that arrives before the thought does.