Aside from supplying Zen footage, this process is how Krutick begins many of her paintings. She’ll cover an entire canvas with textured acrylic molding paste, then sculpt in lines, swirls, and abstract shapes. “As I’m creating it, I might see a story coming out,” she says. In a video on her website, Krutick steps back to study a large canvas that she’s already coated and carved. “I see a lot of vegetation,” she says. “I see a lot of fairytale elements. It’s certainly a happy place.”
She layers colorful paint over the textured paste, swiping on ocean blues and soft reds and pale greens in the video. Color is Krutick’s other passion. She “collects” it everywhere she goes, relying on her strong visual memory to capture a stroll under fiery autumn leaves or a boat ride on a foggy day.
In her abstract works, Krutick’s inspiration has swung from Batman to The Giving Tree to trout. (Her son is a fishing captain in Miami and suggested that last one.) “Inspiration comes from a lot of different places,” she says. “Sometimes they’re just fantasy worlds that I dream about,” as in her Shangri la series, which has hints of Monet. “There are so many different ways that I get transported as I’m painting,” she adds, “which is why I call it taking a journey.”
Krutick’s Ice Cube series draws inspiration from Mark Rothko’s color-field paintings, but often incorporates harder edges and brasher contrasts. She explains on her website that “the Ice Cube shape”—two drippy rectangles separated by a thick band and placed inside a square—“has emerged as my artistic fingerprint.”
“It’s a very unique series, which stands apart from all my other series,” she says. She’s made more than a hundred of them at this point, in various sizes and colors.“The actual image, while simple, is actually very complex when you take a closer look—in terms of the textures and the layers and the nuances that are on the canvas,” she says. “You can actually see so much in what appears to be a simple picture.”
Like many artists, Krutick remembers falling in love with her craft as a kid. By her teen years, she was copying famous Monet and Van Gogh works in oil. But in college she studied finance and decision sciences at Wharton, followed by a 17-year career on Wall Street and then six years as a senior vice president at Warner Music Group. When Warner was taken private in 2011, she threw herself back into painting. Soon “all of that energy that I put into finance got directed into building an art practice,” she says.
She spent four years taking classes at the Art Students League of New York, learning from her teachers as well as the other students.
The more she painted, the more she wanted to paint. By 2017, she had her own studio/gallery. In early 2019, at age 56, she landed her first museum show. “That was a milestone event for me,” she says, recalling the 5,000 square feet—six rooms in all—inside the Coral Springs Museum of Art in Florida that were filled with her work.
Another museum show sprang from that one, then another and another, until Krutick had major momentum and a busy travel schedule heading into 2020. You know what happened next.
