“Paying attention to what's outside, beyond walls, fences and myths of the modern world, my painting process inspires me to become more aware, attuned and present,” says painter, illustrator, printmaker and ceramicist Kat Kinnick. “My art creates a world where animals are reflections of our inner landscape and intimate friends. Nature offers solitude and quiet; a place where you can reset and ground and the loudness and chaos of the world quiets.”
Illustrating wildlife and the wilderness of the high desert of New Mexico, Kinnick works to inspire a culture of connectedness to nature. Drawing on the magic and inexplicable qualities of childhood, her work celebrates the region’s unique ecology and abundant diversity. “Kat’s work uses animals and nature as metaphors for the human world, deeply connected to the environment and other species,” says Hecho a Mano’s owner, Frank Rose. “Through beauty and cuteness, predation and vulnerability, her paintings are not representations of animals as much as they are a mirror to ourselves. They have the ability to disarm the viewer and if one is open enough, recognize their own nature.”
The concept for her forthcoming solo exhibition, Flowering Animals, grew organically from an artist residency Kinnick attended in Oaxaca, Mexico. “The most striking thing about Oaxaca is how warm and kind the people are,” the artist says. “There’s a colorful vitality to the city that’s steeped in reciprocity, craftsmanship, culture, food and art. I wanted to bring this sensation of life into this body of work.”
Flowering Animals honors these qualities in a meditation on home, passage, and the threads that link us. Kinnick’s work in this show demonstrates a loving attention to the world around us and its denizens, depicting animals in a vibrant landscape with an emphasis on beauty, colors, flowers and celebration. The relationship between New Mexico and Oaxaca plays an integral role, symbolized by the jaguar, a creature historically known to travel throughout both regions without regard for borders.
Kinnick describes the animals she depicts as “emblems of resilience and the unseen routes connecting diverse regions across borders.” Her work references and highlights elements of design and reverence for nature common to both Indigenous New Mexican Pueblo artists and her own Germanic European roots, investigating these similarities in works that invite audiences to pose such questions as “How are we more alike than different?” and “What are some common themes found in the visual language of differing traditions?”
Elements of craft from cultures around the world appear throughout the compositions, bridging the historical and the contemporary. Inspired in part by the visual logic of cinema, Kinnick constructs scenes that hover between psychic space and reality, merging the sensuality of daydreaming with diligent observation of the everyday, melding into a form of magical realism. Every blade of grass, and every strand of fur is rendered with an almost devotional care. This labor of regard imbues her paintings with a vitality palpable to the viewer. Her animals appear poised between innocence and experience, between nostalgia and anticipation. The paintings have a distinctly romantic sensibility, and evoke the mystery of a tender, alchemical encounter. Through Kinnick’s emotionally nuanced paintings, we are asked to see the world with renewed reverence, to recognize the beauty and fragility of what surrounds us.
“I have a devotional desire to feel a part of nature,” Kinnick says. “When I need a north star to ground myself in the essence of art, I look to nature… the palette, texture and light.” For her, nature offers a space of quiet and belonging, where new life and growth blossom from decay. “I hope that my paintings bring broader conversations about environmental vulnerability and how those same violences are paralleled in our human world,” Kinnick says. “We are all interconnected and depend on all relations for a mutual well being.”
Flowering Animals will open at Hecho a Mano on Friday, May 1, and will be on view through May 31, 2026.