Kathy Blankley Roman
Biography
Known for her high energy expressive paintings, Chicago artist Kathy Blankley Roman has been painting and showing her current abstract work since 2011 when she returned to art-making full time following her retirement. She has been making art of one kind or another as far back as she can remember. Her art education was mostly self directed. While she took some formal classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she majored in Anthropology and Madison Area Technical College, she developed most of her skills through workshops and classes at local art centers. In her mid years, she became skilled in calligraphy which she exhibited in group shows and art fairs in Wisconsin and Chicago. After a return to school for an AA degree in Commercial Art, she returned to Chicago where she worked as a graphic designer, production manager and freelance illustrator, but her personal art making was always relegated to spare time. That changed when she retired and stumbled upon a class in expressive painting. That was a pivotal experience for her, starting a new direction in her art making and has been at the core of her work ever since. Skilled in multiple mediums, Roman moves easily between acrylics, encaustic and oil & cold wax. An award winning artist, her work has appeared nationally, online and in private and corporate collections and is represented in The Museum of Encaustic Art in Santa Fe, NM.
Artist Statement
Wax, especially hot wax, is a very seductive medium. It can be manipulated to be
transparent or opaque, smooth as glass or highly textured. I explore the relationships
between these opposing elements seeking to orchestrate a dialog between them while
creating an energy, a sense of depth and luminosity and a place of refuge. My
paintings are about texture and gesture and often evoke a sense of place, of mystery, of
elements of the natural world. I combine mixed media with encaustic including, oil
paint, embedded drawings, rice papers and other ephemera and am guided by a sense
of play, experimentation and an exploration of the materials as much as by intuition
and an emotional response to the painting as it develops. It is all about the process.