Minnesota and Maine based artist Kathy Snow Stratton is best known for her large contemporary acrylic abstract  paintings. Each work is optically charged with a subtle complexity of engaging harmonic fields layered with meditative paint applications and a myriad of gestural brushstrokes. Stratton has been an abstract painter since 2005. She credits the Maine woods for her breakthrough into abstraction. The overlapping of branches in the afternoon light of winter inspired and challenged her to paint the chaos of the spaces of light in between. Dynamically she has been caught in the elusive in between ever since. Stratton’s paintings transcend from the metaphorical to the universal in meaning. They are as much about looking as they are about her latent personal truth.

Kathy Snow Stratton was raised in Skowhegan, Maine a small town bordering woods and the Kennebec River. At an early age she marveled at light on water, the beauty that is Maine and at her utopian freedom to explore waterways, fields and the woods at her doorstep. It is then not surprising that the tree and light in between branches would become the key and metaphor for her to explore abstract painting. 

Kathy Snow Stratton has lived and shown her work in the Northeastern United States, Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest. She is a graduate of the University of Maine at Orono and earned her Masters in Studio Painting from Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, MD. She is a masters artist educator and has taught art for public schools and college level institutions in Virginia, Maryland, Maine and Pennsylvania. Stratton has recently exhibited in the Abstract Exhibition at The Minnetonka Center for the Arts, Wayzata, MN and the Arts North International 28 Exhibition at Hopkins Center for the Arts, Hopkins, MN. In 2023 she has three anticipated shows the Muse 12 x 12 Members Exhibition, Studio I at the Grand Marais Artist Colony, Grand Marais, MN, a solo New Work exhibition at One Division Art Gallery in Buffalo, MN and a group show The Abstract Essence of Nature at Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, Chaska, MN. In 2024 Kathy Snow Stratton will be showing in Unexpected Ends with sculptor Dennis Kalow at the Redepenning Gallery, Hopkins Center for the Arts, Hopkins, MN.