Kristin Gustafson's lifelong passion to express herself as an artist has led her down many paths. Sojourn highlights include:

• Showing at gallery exhibitions
• Running a wearable art boutique in the Virgin Islands
• Wholesaling her wearable art line to upscale boutiques
• Accepting a contract to have her designs imprinted on resort clothing and marketed internationally
• Finding fulfillment using art as therapy for mentally challenged individuals
• Consulting for residential and commercial clients' interior design decorative art needs.

For more than 20 years, she has enjoyed exploring and mastering batik, a centuries-old Javanese craft that entails painting on natural fabrics with melted beeswax and cold water dyes. In recent years, she has changed her focus to watercolor and acrylic. Her batik style when painting on silk looked much like watercolor so that transition flowed easily. Kristin's palette preference for brilliant hues, especially cerulean blue, dioxazine purple and alizarin crimson, are the same pigments she preferred during her years in the Caribbean.

Since her aesthetic nature is "idealistic decorative," Kristin feels the artists of the Symbolist period, especially Gaugin and his final testamentary painting "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" have most inspired her ornamental expressionistic style and her personal metaphysical quest.

The artist has works in many collections in the United States and the Caribbean.

Gallery 1     Gallery 2