Bruce Katlin - Biography

Biography

Bruce Katlin is a self-taught artist born in Philadelphia, PA. His eclectic background includes high-altitude trail running to landscape oil painting; wood carvings, climate change and gun-violence influenced sculptures, and fiction writing. His diverse background also includes acting, writing, directing and producing for theatre and film. Bruce attended Penn State University, Metro State College, Denver, CO, City College of New York and Circle in the Square, New York majoring in Psychology, English and Theatre. He attended community art schools as a child but has only recently been able to fully practice his craft.

Bruce combines his love and passion for high mountain trail running and plein air oil painting which, he has discovered, creates an unparalleled nirvana-like state, where pragmatic thinking and intuitiveness flow effortlessly. For the past several years, Bruce has been researching the effects of exercise and its link to creativity and divergent thinking, communicating with National and International research labs compiling their findings along with his own. Bruce’s impressionistic and abstract paintings have been shown in regional shows and exhibits. Bruce Katlin lives and works in Taos, New Mexico.

Artist Statement

Bruce Katlin uses oil paints applied with heavy layers to create abstract landscape paintings that tease out the soul and energy of Mother Nature’s shapes and objects.

Katlin also works with rice paper and natural mediums made from discarded food products and crushed minerals to bring light to our planet’s systematic destruction. His early influences include Russian painter Semen Aronovich Rotnitski, abstract artist Helen Frankenthaler, and Philadelphia abstract marble sculptor Mildred Breggar. Katlin’s work has been shown in physical spaces in and around Taos, New Mexico as well as online venues.