Katrina Starke Kuras
Katrina Starke Kuras lives and works in Toronto, Ontario and graduated with a BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCADU in 2024. She started her creative journey as a hairstylist, but in 2018, her career ended early and abruptly with spinal surgery. Not to be prevented in her pursuit of celebrating individual beauty and her love of people, she turned her passions to drawing, painting and photography. Katrina’s hard work and dedication awarded her the Women’s Art Association of Canada, Carolyn Ruth Freedman Scholarship in 2019 and the Women’s Art Association of Canada, Sandra Henderson Scholarship in 2023, both for excellence in drawing and painting. Her work was exhibited at the Women’s Art Association of Canada at the Dignam Gallery during the Scholarship Recipient Group Show in August 2020 and 2023.
Artist’s Statement
I am painting maternal time and fertility in reverse to identify and confront my fears of a more complicated future filled with sites of interruption. By choosing to be a mother, the artist no longer lives in the world of the isolated, uninterrupted genius that the art world celebrates. My large-scale paintings of babies demonstrate the monumental interruptions to the mother-artist's life, career, and the art world's perception of them. My inspiration comes from the raw and honest moments I experienced with my nephew while inserting those experiences with my emotions throughout my pregnancy and journey to motherhood. The narrative of these paintings belongs to me and not the baby; it's about how I perceive the subject and gain an understanding of my own experiences through paint.
Katrina Starke Kuras is an artist based in Toronto, ON, Canada.
katrinastarkekurasart@gmail.com