Katie Middleton

KATIE MIDDLETON was born in Richmond, Virginia, and currently lives in Los Angeles, California. She earned her BFA in painting from Pratt Institute in 2007 in Brooklyn, New York, where she was also honored with the Early Career Achievement Award in 2016. She also studied painting, printmaking, and art history at L’Universita Internazionale Dell’arte (U.I.A.) in Venice, Italy. In 2023 and 2024, paintings from Katie’s Tessera series have been selected in several group exhibitions including the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum’s “23rd Japan International Art Exchange Exhibition”, and juried group shows at TAG Gallery, Shoebox Arts, Shockboxx Gallery, Dorado 806, and The Hive Gallery. She is also a member of the Los Angeles Art Association.

Beyond her painting, Katie works as a union make-up and special effects artist in television and film. In 2017, she received a nomination for a Hollywood Makeup Artist and Hair Stylist Guild Award for her work on the film Loving. Katie is also the author of the book Color Theory for the Make-up Artist: Understanding Color and Light for Beauty and Special Effects, which was first published by Routledge in 2018 and a second edition was released in 2022.

In my “Tessera” figurative series, I like to explore the interplay between geometric shapes found in objects such as tiles and the organic forms of nature, finding harmony in their contrast. My paintings often center around portraiture, using opposing colors and intricate patterns to capture the subject while shaping their mood and personality. I enjoy finding hues and repetitions in unexpected places and weaving them into the overall design. Expanding on contrasting elements, I have also been interested in ideas of reality versus artificial creations. My human figures are all painted from real models, but I have started to incorporate references from AI interpretations of imagined plants and flowers, intertwining realism and a surrealistic world. I like to represent personalities by using objects found in nature in contrast with repetitive shapes such as tiles, and see how these added elements and palettes can change the overall feeling of a subject. I will create busy and chaotic designs on a computer, and the excitement comes when translating these into physical pigments and brush strokes by challenging myself to combine disjointed components into a cohesive, peaceful world.