Katelin Schutt
Katelin Schutt’s relationship to art formed early, shaped by both encouragement and quiet isolation. In her family, artistic ability was treated as something innate rather than learned. While she showed an early aptitude for drawing, her parents’ fear of “doing it wrong” meant that art gradually became a solitary practice. That early dynamic left a lasting imprint, one she continues to confront each time she enters the studio.
Despite limited cultural exposure growing up in southwest Virginia, Schutt was persistently drawn to images. She recalls studying the small reproductions of artworks in school textbooks with fascination, long before visiting museums or encountering original works. From a young age, drawing was constant. One of her earliest sketchbooks, made around age eight or nine, is filled entirely with horses, inspired by classified ads she studied obsessively as a child. Over time, her focus shifted from animals to people, and figural drawing became central to her practice.
Schutt followed a nontraditional educational path. Since 2022, she has studied through New Master’s Academy, and she spent a year in Steve Huston’s Draws From Life mentorship program. This training fundamentally reshaped both her work and her understanding of what it means to live as an artist. Huston’s mentorship, in particular, emphasized discipline, embodiment, and permission—permission to pursue creative freedom fully and without apology. For Schutt, this marked a turning point, transforming art from an isolated activity into a sustained way of life.
Experimentation plays a foundational role in her practice. She moves fluidly between realism, surrealism, and abstraction, allowing the concept of a piece to determine its medium and form. Whether working in painting, drawing, or soft sculpture, her process is driven by the need to match material to emotion. Rather than limiting her work to a single genre, she combines approaches, creating space for exploration without confinement.
Recurring themes in Schutt’s work center on the human condition. She is deeply interested in embodiment, spiritual consciousness, and the constant movement between birth, death, and transformation. Drawing from Jungian psychology, the concept of the shadow appears frequently, explored through techniques such as chiaroscuro, metamorphosis, fragmentation, and overexposure. Even in non-figurative works, questions of existence and meaning remain present.
Her influences include Steve Huston, John Asaro, John Singer Sargent, Scott Burdick, and Dorielle Caimi. From these artists, she draws lessons in action, color, visible brushwork, and the legitimacy of the female nude as a subject shaped by women artists themselves. These references inform her technical decisions while supporting a distinctly personal visual language.
Schutt’s studio practice adapts to the rhythms of family life. Working from a home studio while raising two young children, she does not follow a rigid daily structure, but aims to devote several hours each day to creative work. When she encounters resistance or fatigue, she steps away deliberately, understanding that time outside the studio is often as necessary as time within it. Living creatively, for her, extends beyond making objects.
Her current body of work, Metanoia: Change of Heart/Mind, seeks to visualize spiritual transformation as an unfolding process rather than a fixed state. Influenced by meditation and sensory deprivation practices, the work centers on raw, natural figuration intended to remind viewers of what they are beneath habit, fear, and social conditioning. Rather than delivering a singular message, the series presents a continuum of inner change.
Schutt measures success by commitment rather than outcome. Showing up to make the work, sustaining a creative life, and allowing herself to remain open to transformation define success more clearly than external validation. Looking ahead, she hopes her work reaches those who need it, whether through exhibitions, public installations, or intimate encounters with individual viewers.
Her debut solo exhibition, Metanoia, opens April 12 in Nashville, Tennessee. The show marks a significant personal and artistic milestone, bringing together years of study, introspection, and disciplined exploration into a body of work that reflects both vulnerability and resolve.
