Art Technique: acrylic gouache, oil pastel, colored pencil, and gold ink on watercolor paper
Art: 6.5 in x 13 in hand-painted wood frame: 15.5 in x 23 in x 3 in
Artist’s Statement
Some days the bravest thing you’ll do is simply not quit. No big breakthrough. No applause. Just another step when it would be easier to sit down and stay there. The effort you think doesn’t count but the small healing, the private rebuilding, the choice to try again, is the real work. It’s slow, and it’s stubborn, and it matters more than you know. Keep going. You’re not behind. You’re growing roots.
Aunia Kahn (she/her) is a contemporary artist and curator working across gouache, acrylic, colored pencil, and dimensional mixed media creating layered compositions that weave personal narrative with rich cultural symbolism. Recognized as the originator of Contemporary Symbolist Folk, a lineage rooted in symbolic depth and personal mythos, Kahn draws from French Canadian German Polish and Scandinavian folk traditions Pre-Raphaelite and Surrealist lineages and the natural world to create a visual language entirely her own. Her paintings explore sanctuary transformation and the threshold between life and death articulated through a recurring iconography of women, animals, and nature rendered in a saturated palette and dense ornamentation evocative of folk textile and decorative traditions. Having lived through years of life-threatening illness, Kahn approaches this liminal space not as abstraction but as personal terrain giving her work a rare emotional authority.
Instagram: @auniakahn