About Kate

In A Few Words

Kate Young is an abstract artist based in Guelph, Ontario, working primarily in acrylic and mixed media. Through vibrant colour, luminous layers, and intuitive mark-making, she creates paintings that explore light, atmosphere, and our sensory experience of the natural world.

The Process

A self-taught artist, Kate has developed her practice over more than a decade through exploration, experimentation, and a deep curiosity about colour and material. Working primarily with palette knives, scrapers, and layered acrylic mediums, she builds surfaces that reveal movement, depth, and unexpected relationships between colours and forms.

Rather than beginning with a fixed image or plan, each painting develops through an intuitive process of layering, subtraction, and response. Colour relationships, texture, and compositional rhythms gradually emerge as each mark influences the next, allowing unexpected moments to shape the final work.

The Inspiration

Inspiration often begins with the experience of being immersed in nature—the changing light through trees, shifting weather, seasonal colour, or quiet moments that invite closer attention. Rather than depicting specific places, Kate's paintings explore the atmosphere and emotional resonance of these experiences.

Alongside her artistic practice, Kate worked as a Registered Dietitian for more than a decade. Her interest in intuition, perception, and embodied experience continues to inform her approach to painting. Through abstraction, she explores colour, light, and texture as sensory experiences, creating work that invites curiosity, reflection, and personal interpretation.

Follow Kate's journey

If you'd like an occasional glimpse into life in the studio, Kate would love to share it with you. Her monthly newsletter includes works in progress, reflections on the landscape that inspires her, and news about upcoming exhibitions.