Kathryn Graven is a mixed-media artist living and working in downtown Boston and on an island in Downeast Maine. She re-purposes old memories and found objects to tell new visual stories.
Kathryn turned to mixed-media painting after an exciting career in journalism because she wanted to explore other forms of storytelling. Now, snippets of an old friend’s dress, forgotten shoji screens, scraps of fabric from a favorite bag, broken dishes, costume jewelry, hand-made paper — all serve as her vocabulary.
Kathryn is passionate about bringing different cultures into her daily life and art. She draws inspiration from her years of living in Japan and India, and traveling off the beaten track through Asia, Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand.
On Great Cranberry Island in Maine, Kathryn and her family tend a bountiful organic garden and orchard. The seaside garden nurtures her creative energies, and has lead to her “seed to canvas” artistic process. Kathryn plants seeds in spring, watches the seedlings grow, harvests many beautiful bouquets and then tries to capture that intimate joy and excitement in her mixed- media paintings.
Kathryn studied mixed-media and abstract painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. These courses redirected her away from the written word toward painting colorful, whimsical, visual celebrations of memories moving on. In 2008, she founded Studio 319, an art studio and gallery in Boston’s South End.