A bit about me: Classic misfit, teenage runaway, bookworm, never finished school, an autodidact in every way. I was born and raised here in the Berkshires, and did a brief stint in southern CA before the earthquakes and the posers sent me running back home to the hills. Sweet New England… In any case, I live here in Lenox, MA with my husband, photographer Edward Acker.

You may wonder as you look at the paintings collected here why most of them are sold. I can hear you: “Kris, where’s all the new stuff?” Well, about six years ago, I decided to put my brushes down. I’m not even sure why - I’ve been trying to figure it out ever since. But I think I realized one day that painting had lost its shine for me and had instead become a chore. After a few years of navel gazing, I came to the conclusion that art, for me, had morphed into a sort of striving for respect. The world had changed since I’d started painting - social media, the need for everyone everywhere to share and post and climb over each other in order to rank higher on the social hierarchy. It changed us. It changed art. No hard feelings here; it’s evolution (or devolution, depending…). In any case, I saw within myself a hungry heart - starving, in fact, and looking for strokes in all the wrong places. It had to stop, at least until I can once again find an authentic desire to create.

Now, a word about these paintings. I taught myself to paint in my twenties, as a way to express what I had no other way to say. My take is that these images are about the things I prize above all else: Peace, quiet, introspection, figuring things out. It took me a long time to understand that this was what I was trying to convey. I was simply getting down the images that came to my mind. Anyway, creating art served me well for about thirty years. It was a good run! Perhaps the muse will one day return from her long lunch and kick me in the shins once again. She’s funny that way. Stay tuned.