When the German painter and early Expressionist Emil Nolde left for the South Seas in 1913, he followed the same longing that drove Paul Gauguin years before: they both hoped to find unspoiled people and intact nature in a sort of paradise that seemed to be lost forever in Europe. The artists may not have found exactly that, but the colors in the resulting paintings reflect a new unknown brightness, bestowing a luminous quality to otherwise somber tones. Nolde painted the sea in many variations. The horizon divides his paintings almost equally, with golden-orange sky and deep green and black water, the ocean often stormy and the waves crowned with white spume.

Not so in Katherine Jost's paintings. The horizon, the waves crowned with spume, glide to the top of the canvas, revealing the hidden depths beneath the surface. Katherine Jost holds her breath, plunges, and discovers a mysterious landscape. The formations seem bizarre, recalling bright corals, fragile jellyfish, or flamboyant rocks. She dives deep into the dark, and then, when the last oxygen has left her lungs, she emerges with a rush, just to catch some air and plunge again.

Expressionists, fascinated by the power of color and the interpretation of nature as a composition of colorful forms, opened painting to abstraction. While Katherine Jost's earlier paintings depict animals that are clearly discernible, the current paintings embrace abstraction. They guide the viewer into another sphere of consciousness, revealing what otherwise stays invisible, submerged in the sea:

Through intuitive processes of subjective association, emotional gaps are impregnated with personal fiction. The hybridization of fiction and memory often suggests the possibility of a whole and complete story. Seductive in its proposal to make order of the jumble of images that comprise compounded memory and fantasy, the work will ultimately expand and persist, inching further from reconciliation through studio development. (Katherine Jost)

KATHERINE JOST earned her BFA in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2000, and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. She has participated in several group shows in Chicago, directs Stump Town Gallery in Alma, Wisconsin, and currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Richard J. Daley College, and College of DuPage.