Kathryn MacNaughton

“I wanted my digital work to look raw and handmade. Now that I create “physical” paintings, I want to give the illusion that the work is digital.”

Kathryn MacNaughton deftly interweaves figurative painting with a combination of abstract expressionism, geometric abstraction, and even conventions of the painted still-life into one poetic statement. MacNaughton, who trained and worked as a graphic designer, uses this sort of 'digital compression' to her advantage, and one begins to use typically post- analog language when discussing her work: masking, layering, colour-blocking, silhouette. In this sense, the canvas - and the analog process of the painter's hand - references the computer screen and the digital touch, where these pieces originally begin to take their shape.

In Flow,forms of figuration and still life have been flattened like their more abstract counterparts, to face the frontal plane of the canvas. MacNaughton's training in graphic design is here paired with more Romantic expressive movements: a scribble dances across a bust, outlined in silhouette, which guides the viewer's eye around the flattened curves as one guides the finger across a map. The work simultaneously houses a sensuality one aligns with gender tropes: as suggestions of feminine curves play shadow-tricks, appearing as vessels or curtains that guide the eye, but also obscure and reveal the picture plane while painterly curves leap behind and before the picture plane.