Gold Rush Painting

Kristen Guest is an award-winning and published full-time artist and art instructor in San Diego, California. She graduated from art school at Middle Tennessee State University with a degree in Art Education, that focused on painting, book arts and printmaking, and has been teaching realism painting since 2004 and abstract painting since 2018. Currently, Kristen is the Resident Artist at Bernardo Winery in San Diego, where her studio is located, and she is a Mentor and the Director of Education at Art on 30th, an arts community in San Diego's North Park historic arts district. Her work is currently represented through Ashton Gallery in San Diego and Janssen Art Space in Palm Springs, and has been displayed on exhibit with The Athenaeum Arts & Music Library in California, Huntington Beach Art Center in California, Port Angeles Fine Arts Center in Washington, Jen Tough Gallery on Artsy.com, Saatchi's The Other Art Fair Online Studios Los Angeles, and Guest House Staging in San Diego. STATEMENT: I'm a landscape lover pulling inspiration from regional areas and nature for my creative choices; translating the beauty and atmospheric feeling of these places into marks, color, and texture that often result in dramatic shapes, gestural lines, and visual tension. Though I use reference photos that I’ve taken from my travels for inspiration in the studio, I don't always focus on creating a loose rendition of a photo. Sometimes I will instead deconstruct the image in a very abstract way and infuse my painting with the feeling or ‘mood’ of these places, creating a comforting familiarity or nostalgia for viewers who have also visited and escaped to these iconic destinations. Most of my travels take me to two regions that couldn’t be more opposite: the SoCal desert and Hawaii. Aside from their differences, they have one alluring thing in common: time has a way of standing still and you find yourself getting lost in your surroundings. It’s that feeling of being away on vacation—relaxing, wandering, exploring, indulging—that I enjoy “bottling up” into my work.