Hi!  My name is Kristen. I'm a young emerging artist on the Northshore. Graduated with my BFA in painting and my certification and license in Art Education for the state of MA from Montserrat College of Art.

I've been actively creating for most of my life. Painting, drawing, scribbling, making a bunch of marks, and what some might say "making a mess" since my childhood. It wasn't until I was in high school and had an amazing art teacher that I realized that the feeling I had when making art  wouldn't just go away, and that it was called passion. I haven't stoped since.

Primarily I paint the landscape. Subtlety in the details and in the marks allow for a translucent feeling as your eye sweeps across the surface. Writing is incorporated into some of my works to convey my thoughts, feelings, ideas, and all of the senses experienced when I visit that particular place that I am painting. It is also used as another form of mark-making. Seeing as how most if not all of the words written cannot be read, because of them being illegibal or backwards or even fragmented thoughts covered up by the colors of the landscape. Myself knowing that they are there provides my mind with a great feeling of ease. The burdens have been lifted. The thoughts expressed permanently onto a surface where they will be forever.

Someone once asked me why it is that I paint and not make music,sculpt, write, perform etc.  My answer to them was simply this:   "I do all of those things. Paint is merely the instrument in which my music is created. It is what I sculpt an idea or feeling out of. It is what I write in and with to tell my visual story. And it is paint that allows me to perform everytime I approach a surface with a new idea."    ---Kristen Johnson