Artist Q & A: Nicole Katsuras
Atlas officially opens on May 9 and runs through May 23, 2026.
Nicole Katsuras, Mistral March. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
1. The influence of historical Japanese aesthetic concepts is a wonderful element of your work. What was the genesis of your fascination with Japanese art and aesthetics, and do you think the incorporation of historic ideas is important in the meaningful evolution of contemporary abstraction?
My fascination with Japanese art and aesthetics really grew out of a broader, long-standing interest in art history - particularly the role that movements like Impressionism and Modernism play in shaping contemporary art. For me, understanding where art comes from is essential to understanding how it evolves and where it's going.
Japanese ukiyo-e prints were profoundly influential on Impressionist painters, following the reopening of trade between Japan and Europe in 1853. Claude Monet was known to have hundred of prints in his studio. During the 1860s, these prints became a kind of visual “pop culture”, collected and studied by artists in Europe who were drawn to their flattened perspectives, bold compositions, and unconventional use of colour. That cross-cultural exchange continues to resonate in how we think about abstraction today.
Paradoxically, it’s often this inward, solitary process that allows the work to resonate most broadly when it is eventually shared. When something is made with a degree of authenticity and specificity, it tends to carry a kind of clarity and conviction that others can feel, even if they interpret it differently. The work doesn’t try to speak to everyone, but because it's grounded in something genuine, it often ends up connecting with people in unexpected and meaningful ways. For me, solitude isn’t about isolation in a negative sense - it’s a generative space where innovation can happen quietly, before entering into dialogue with the public. And when that work is finally shared, it carries both the intimacy of its origins and the potential for collective resonance.
So yes, I do think the incorporation of historical ideas is important - not as a form of imitation, but as a way of grounding contemporary abstraction in a continuum. It’s through this dialogue with the past that new forms can carry depth, innovation, resonance, and meaning.
Nicole Katsuras, Graffiti Garden. OIl on canvas, 48 x 72 inches
2. In the studio, do you like to work on multiple paintings simultaneously? How do you find that the works “speak” to each other?
In my studio, working on multiple paintings at once is both part of the challenge and part of the excitement, working with oil paint. On a practical level, the drying time makes it difficult to focus on just one piece from start to finish. But beyond that, I’ve come to see the process as a kind of creative rhythm.
Having several works on the go feels a bit like writing a chaptered novel. Each painting is its own moment, but they’re all interconnected - responding to one another, building on shared ideas, and subtly shifting direction as a group. A colour relationship or gesture in one piece might spark a resolution in another, or open up an entirely new direction that I hadn’t anticipated.
In that way, the works “speak” to each other through a kind of visual dialogue. They help guide decisions, suggest continuities, and even introduce tensions that push the series forward. It’s not a linear process, but a dynamic one - where each painting both influences and is influenced by the others, gradually shaping a larger, evolving narrative.
Nicole Katsuras, Wada Realm. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
3. Can you talk about your approach to colour and colour harmony via the works of Sanzo Wada for this collection?
My approach to colour in this body of work is very much rooted in both intuition and intentional challenge. I naturally gravitate toward blues and greens - they feel instinctive to me - but I’m equally interested in pushing beyond those tendencies to discover less expected harmonies. Introducing unfamiliar or even slightly dissonant combinations often heightens the presence of each colour, making the overall composition feel more nuanced, dynamic, and visually engaging.
In this process, I’ve been deeply influenced by the work of Sanzo Wada. His book, A Dictionary of Color Combinations, is a study in balance and sensitivity to colour relationships. There are 159 carefully selected colours, each chosen not only for its individual beauty but for how it interacts with others.
What I find especially compelling about Wada’s approach is the sense of restraint and refinement: there’s a quiet sophistication in the way colours are paired, often in ways that feel surprising yet completely resolved. It encourages me to think of colour less as isolated choices and more as part of an ecosystem, where each hue gains meaning through its relationship to another.
For my new collection of paintings in Altas, that influence translates into a more deliberate orchestration of colour harmony. I’m exploring how subtle shifts in tone, contrast, and saturation can create emotional and spatial tension within the work. In that sense, colour becomes both a structural and expressive tool, guiding the viewer’s experience while also inviting a slower, more attentive way of looking.
Nicole Katsuras, Returning Cotinga. Oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches
4. The extruded paint forms suggest a bodily action, like traces of movements. Are there gestures that feel instinctual versus learned over time, and how has your mark-making vocabulary evolved over the years, finding the balance between “calculated precision and spontaneous gesture”?
I’ve always been deeply interested in the materiality of paint - what it can do beyond simply describing an image. Over time, my process has evolved through a desire to push those boundaries and to develop a visual vocabulary that feels distinctly my own, while still being informed by art history.
My approach to impasto and extrusion sits in that space between control and unpredictability. There’s a very deliberate, almost calculated aspect to how the compositions are structured - the placement of forms, the orchestration of colour, the balance within the picture plane. But once I begin working with the paint itself, especially in its more sculptural, extruded form, there’s an element of contingency that comes into play. The material has its own behaviour - its weight, its resistance, its flow - and I have to respond to that in real time. That’s where spontaneity enters. The balance comes from allowing those two modes to coexist: setting up a framework with intention, and then letting the physical act of painting introduce variation, irregularity, and surprise.
Conceptually, the visual language of ukiyo-e and the philosophy of wabi-sabi, construct my images to hold tension between precision and irregularity, surface and depth, control and chance. The compositions often begin with luminous, hand-dragged oil grounds - fields of flat colour or subtle gradients that echo the spatial clarity and restraint of ukiyo-e prints. Into these quieter, distilled spaces, I introduce highly textured impasto forms that rise from the surface in an almost sculptural way. There’s a push and pull between the optical and the tactile: colour as atmosphere, and paint as matter.
The extruded paint lines are central to that language. They’re inspired in part by the bold contour lines seen in ukiyo-e wood block prints, but reinterpreted as delicate, raised linear elements. Rather than simply outlining, they act as both visual guides and physical traces -marking the movement of the hand and reinforcing the presence of the artist within the work.
In terms of gesture, there’s definitely a blend of instinct and learned behaviour. Some movements feel immediate, like muscle memory, while others have developed over time through repetition, refinement, and experimentation. As my practice has evolved, so has my sensitivity to these marks: I sense when to let them remain raw and spontaneous, and when to intervene more precisely.
What’s important to me is that the mark-making doesn’t become overly fixed or formulaic. Even though there is a growing vocabulary, I’m constantly trying to keep it open so that each gesture still carries a sense of discovery. That ongoing tension between familiarity and risk is what allows the work to continue evolving.
The artist at her Toronto studio with Fauve Heart, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches