Kristin Texeira is a multi-faceted artist who paints to capture moments in time, recording memories and representing profound ideas with her brilliant use of color. We recently took some time to catch up with Kristin and dig a little deeper into her story and her process.

I’m from West Bridgewater, Mass – part of the “Bridgewater Triangle Curse” – I recommend Googling. Technically, my bed is in upstate New York, but I’ve only slept in it maybe four months this year because I had a lot of odd jobs. My books are at my studio in Brooklyn, and I consider home to be where my bed and books are, so I’ll say that I live mostly in upstate New York, but I have my fingertips in Brooklyn still. Currently, my bed is on a boat in Sausalito, but that’s temporary.

My grandmother let me paint on her walls and windowsills with crappy, child-proof watercolors so she could wash it off. That’s my earliest memory of painting. I always loved color. I started off as more of a representational artist, trying to copy what I saw – I thought that I would make a living painting wedding portraits. I had little abstractions at my studio while I was in school. I considered them studies or trash, but my professor was always asking about them. He thought they were more interesting than my landscape paintings – so I was encouraged to pay attention to the little marks of color on scrap paper, and eventually, they became the real work.

Books – Lydia Davis, Hemingway, Ray Bradbury. Music – painting the colors of songs. The Esoteric. Lately, Physics of Time – does that count as culture? Probably not, but it’s informing my work the most at the moment.

I worked on a mural this summer in Cleveland that was 3 stories high and 300 feet long. That big boy was an accomplishment. I had never used a scissor lift in my life – thankfully the homies I hired had. We maxed the lift out – swaying in the wind a bit. My mom probably would have passed out if she had seen me. The mural was based on a novel by James McBride called the Color of Water – beautiful story about the strength of family love and written by a black man raised by a white mother in Brooklyn back in the 60s. Was an honor to create visuals for his story and share it on such a fat scale.

Most of my work starts as writing – my work is based on memory, and I typically tell stories that I don’t want to forget. Writing is the quickest way to preserve a moment – then I can go back to the studio and mix colors to match.

Gathering stories over dinner tables, creating metaphors, putting myself in new places so that my eyes get shocked wide open.

Asking as many people as possible “WHAT DOES TIME LOOK LIKE?” and making work about the answers.

Eating chips, cracking seltzers like no tomorrow, weeding the garden.

I wouldn’t necessarily say I look like my paintings, but I am into that monochrome trend – like wearing four different tans: tan shirt, tan pants, tan jacket, tan shoe, maybe a brown scrunchie if I’m feeling WILD – and my paintings are like that – subtle shifts of color – might look like it’s all one color, but when you squint, you can see the differences.

Probably be a dental hygienist.

Read: What Artists Do: – Leonard Koren

Watched: watched the first 2 hours of Magnolia with my boyfriend, but then had a panic attack because it was so heavy, so I quit with about 20 minutes left, chugged two glasses of water, and put on the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack.

Listened to: Six Etudes for Piano (q = 108 – Philip Glass). Needed to focus, so threw it on repeat.

Photos taken by Brian Kelley