Artist’s Bio

Maddie Stratton (b.1991) is a New Orleans born figurative painter and illustrator. She has been making art for as long as she can remember. She is obsessed with color and loves drawing people and animals. She attended NOCCA and, after receiving a BFA from Pratt Institute, she moved back to her hometown in 2014.
Her ongoing zine series, Art History Coloring books combines her desire for accessible art and art history and love of drawing has been featured on Buzzfeed and is sold in shops around the country, including a custom book for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
She wears a variety of hats, working as gallery director at Kirschman Artspace in NOCCA, painting elements of house floats for Stronghold studios but she spends most of her time making her own paintings in her studio in the Bywater.

Artist Statement:
My paintings depict animals and natural elements alongside figurative portraits. The elements of nature are out of place, often encroaching into areas intended for people. I am inspired by the human need to both interact with, as well as control, the natural world that we live in. I aim to show the power of nature and its ability to adapt despite being suppressed. By creating this unsettling dynamic between human and nature, I am examining our culture's need for both wildness as well as comfortability.
In my process, I have a general idea of the message that I want to convey in a painting, but never a crystal clear image of what the finished piece will be. I will often piece together elements from pictures I've taken and images from the internet to construct the initial composition. I use this as a springboard, and once I begin painting, my process is spontaneous and responsive. I continue to make compositional decisions as I work, sometimes making big changes that can alter the entire mood of a painting.
A lot of my paintings start with a messy and colorful wash that informs the fully realized piece. I use a combination of acrylic paint and house paint. Sometimes I like to go looking at the discounted paint cans at hardware stores to return with great quantities of a color that might not have crossed my mind to mix up. This element of my process echoes the idea that we only have so much control over the spaces that we occupy.