Katina Desmond creates otherworldly images through her signature technique of oil painting on black and white photography. Seizing on the abstract, ethereal qualities photography reveals in the environment, she mutates the mundane into the mysterious by highlighting archetypal patterns, textures and forms present all around us.
Viewers are immediately struck by the look of Katina’s work - it’s baffling and unfamiliar, yet emotionally direct. The hybrid technique she uses, which produces an original synthesis of two disparate visual mediums, is the creative force that drives this response. The photographic element is heavily obscured by the painterly dimension, and the bent in much of the work is toward color-saturated abstraction. The affect of her work, though not necessarily its look, is similar to that of her primary artistic influences found mainly among the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists (Kandinsky, Ernst, and Miro, in particular).
Katina’s work, though it relies on such traditional processes as hand printing silver gelatin photographs in a dark room, deviates sharply from realism not only in style, but also in its fundamental intentions. “At the root of all my work is an attempt to reveal something previously unseen or hidden to the viewer, yet somehow familiar,” says Katina. “I am not attempting to specifically recreate subject matter, but rather to conjure its spirit or emotive quality.”