Kathryn Gabinet-Kroo began her career as an artist studying life drawing and black and white photography at the Boston Museum School. A painter for forty years and a former instructor at the Saidye Bronfman School of Fine Arts, the artist has had her studio in the neighborhood of St. Henri since 1989. Finding herself without access to a darkroom, she began working in watercolour and then in oil, which opened the doors to the world of colour and as a self-taught painter, she developed a technique that suited her highly realistic portraits, still lifes and representations of nature.
While some of her works incorporate the use of gouache, pastel, and oil stick, most of the images are created using the classical technique of layering a series of oil glazes over an oil underpainting to produce the glowing colors of her painted surfaces. Most recently, the artist has added to her body of work a series of monoprints and images painted on collages of Japanese papers. Her work can be found in Canadian and American collections and in such far-flung countries as China, Switzerland and Singapore. Her paintings have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States and England.
“Preserving the moment, forming a memory but without the nostalgia, without that wistful desire to return to a former time in one’s life, that sentimental yearning for lost happiness. In painting these images, I am recreating or returning to the happiness of a certain time and place, expressing my appreciation for the earth’s beauty, which I find in the simplest things ‒ a flower, a face, a branch, a fish underwater ‒ and showing the world what and how I see.”

Kathryn Gabinet-Kroo began her career as an artist studying life drawing and black and white photography at the Boston Museum School. A painter for forty years and a former instructor at the Saidye Bronfman School of Fine Arts, the artist has had her studio in the neighborhood of St. Henri since 1989. Finding herself without access to a darkroom, she began working in watercolour and then in oil, which opened the doors to the world of colour and as a self-taught painter, she developed a technique that suited her highly realistic portraits, still lifes and representations of nature.
While some of her works incorporate the use of gouache, pastel, and oil stick, most of the images are created using the classical technique of layering a series of oil glazes over an oil underpainting to produce the glowing colors of her painted surfaces. Most recently, the artist has added to her body of work a series of monoprints and images painted on collages of Japanese papers. Her work can be found in Canadian and American collections and in such far-flung countries as China, Switzerland and Singapore. Her paintings have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States and England.
“Preserving the moment, forming a memory but without the nostalgia, without that wistful desire to return to a former time in one’s life, that sentimental yearning for lost happiness. In painting these images, I am recreating or returning to the happiness of a certain time and place, expressing my appreciation for the earth’s beauty, which I find in the simplest things ‒ a flower, a face, a branch, a fish underwater ‒ and showing the world what and how I see.”