Kayla Marie Carlson (b. July, 1991) is a painter, writer, and designer raised in the Midwest and currently based in Portland, Oregon. She grew up splitting her time between places - northern Wisconsin and southeastern Iowa - spending long days in her parents’ vehicles daydreaming through the passenger side window into rolling hills and rest stops, forests and farm fields, always with great background tracks blasting from the stereo. She received her degree in Interior Architecture in 2014 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked for multiple award-winning design firms for a decade.

Kayla’s work is concerned with the perpetual search for personal identity through storytelling, narrative, and connection with the natural world. She is particularly interested in and influenced by landscapes, dreams and fantasies, memories and nostalgia, mythology, fables, magical realism, songwriting and poetry as tools for self-discovery, and aims to express the feelings and experiences these elements evoke through her visual art.

Her painting style flows between abstract expressionism and impressionism; her initial layers are often broad, embodied, atmospheric color washes that cover the entire canvas, and the subsequent layers become more focused, textural, intimate, and involved. Her works are composed intuitively and experimentally, influenced by and evocative of her reverence for the natural world - especially via her lifelong travels through the landscapes of the Midwest, West, and Pacific Northwest - and how the external world often reflects or influences the internal human experience. The interplay of layers, textures, color, organic shapes and mark-making yield compositions that are whimsical, poetic, tender, imaginative, playful, and expressive, blurring the boundary between reality and fiction, natural and fabricated.

Curriculum Vitae

b.1991, Largo, Florida

Currently based in Portland, Oregon

Education

Bachelor of Science in Interior Architecture, 2014, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Exhibitions

Darling Citizen, Makerspace, Portland, Oregon | January - February 2025

Too Soft For All Of It, Perch Furniture, Portland, Oregon | May June July 2024

Natural Formations, Fine Art Fruit, Portland, Oregon | April + May 2024

Residencies

Duplex AIR, Lisbon, Portugal | September + October 2024