Kyle Dittemore

I’m a self-taught abstract expressionist who paints from the tension between survival and surrender. My work lives at the intersection of recovery, rage, and resilience—each canvas is an attempt to hold still long enough to break open.

I began painting in the early 2000s, but my current body of work comes from the aftermath of addiction and the long road back to presence. After getting sober from heroin and benzos nearly a decade ago—then walking away from alcohol years later—painting became the language I couldn’t find in therapy. The brush replaced the bottle. Color replaced collapse.

I work full-time in a demanding corporate environment while building a coaching practice, which means art happens in the margins—but it’s never marginal. It’s how I metabolize chaos. My pieces are intuitive, gestural, and built from repetition. You’ll find hidden script, aggressive mark-making, and emotional color fields. These aren’t pretty paintings. They’re honest ones.

I make art for people who feel too much and can’t always say it.

I studied at Wichita State University, but my art education came through obsession, practice, and pain. I didn’t learn in critique circles—I learned by scraping through recovery, layering color over trauma, and returning to the canvas again and again.