About the artist

 

     Katie Butler is an emerging artist from Southwestern Ontario. Her growth as an artist is deeply rooted in a family heritage that encompasses a maternal lineage of visual artists and storytellers. This familial influence introduced Katie to her artistic practice from a young age, but while many of the artists’ interest in history led them to create accurate visual retellings of North American and Italian history, Katie resonated with the closer to home bed time stories her mother and her grandmother would illustrate, where she was often the main character.

     After completing her undergraduate degree in 2021 and relocating to Toronto, where she was met with lots of change and heartache, Katie realized the profound personal significance of her creative practice. She shifted her work away from more classical, poised portraiture to expressive personal scenes that empowered her to connect with her own emotions and invited audiences to do the same. Katie displayed these new acrylic paintings that had equal emphasis on technique and message at the 2023 Toronto Artist Project and has since worked with the Tacit Collective and Cry Baby Gallery to showcase her pieces.

     Continuing on this trajectory, Katie is currently working on a body of work exploring the range of her emotions experienced in an unhealthy relationship. By making her biggest mistakes and feelings into works of art, she practices radical self acceptance. Katie’s art doesn’t inspire to be unique; instead it seeks to elicit empathy from the viewer, evoking comfort or discomfort as they see themselves honestly – the always messiness, sometimes silliness and every so often tragedy of navigating the human experience.