Memories Fuel Baltimore Artist to Create Using Intaglio Printmaking
October 15, 2025
Kathryn Maher paints the familiar with an eye for fleeting details that find beauty in everyday places.
More than not, she walks and rides through the streets of New York City to study what most anyone would recognize and dismiss.
A man in a hooded sweatshirt leaning against a pillar on a subway platform. A bus traveling its evening route after a rain shower. A woman clutching a metal post while standing on a train.
Or simpler still: power lines cutting through the sky, a patch of asphalt, a building covered with graffiti.
These are not the traditional beautiful moments.
Yet Kathryn’s ability to translate the nuances of those scenes onto canvas is a gift, one she discovered later in life.
“I love the idea that I go out with my eyes open, curious, and look around almost as if I was just born,” she said. “When you are aligned with what you love to do, your spirit is full, your heart is open and everything comes in. You want everything to come in.”
Minus a few creative projects in school, Kathryn went years without picking up a paintbrush. Her days were hectic, between raising four children with her husband, John, and her long hours as a partner in a small Bronx law firm.
“Art came to me as a place to go for peace,” she said. “When you get older you need a place to go for peace.”
About eight years ago, Kathryn started taking art lessons to nurture the creative side of herself. One lesson a week became two.
“The more I painted, the more I wanted to learn,” she said.
Kathryn immersed herself in art studies, through classes at The Art Students League of New York. She also studied under two Florence Academy trained artists at Long Island Academy of Fine Arts. Workshops in Italy are on the calendar every summer, and she recently returned from a Rome workshop, inspired and ready to work.
Kathryn’s hunger to learn conflicted with the taxing schedule her law career demanded. Rising at dawn to catch a train into the city, working a full day and not returning home until midnight after an art class became exhausting.
“I decided I wanted to do art a whole lot more, and I couldn’t do both,” said Kathryn, who left the law practice to focus on her art.
Finding her niche took time. Initially, Kathryn painted beach scenes and conventional landscapes. Painting her first cityscape – observed through her windshield in the rain – spoke to her in a new way.
She calls the 5 by 7 piece: “moody, evocative and yet familiar.”
It also helped her recognize how she wanted to paint. Suddenly, she started riding into the city and taking walks solely to observe, giving herself time to digest what most of us walk by.
She often finds connection in commuters hurrying about another day. Examining the architecture of a bridge or the chaos of an intersection can spark an idea. Those moments of discovery happen thanks to repeated trips to the same location. That might be Times Square at night. Or a roadway buried in construction. Both are part of her Cityscapes series as is “Tire Shop,” an oil on aluminum.
Who chooses to paint two workers at a tire shop?
“I had to paint them,” Kathryn said, inspired by a commercial block on 45th Street in Manhattan’s west side. “They were in their element. They blended into their environment in a way that felt natural, at ease, like they were at home. The tires were a beautiful stage to set them off.”
The lighting in her paintings adds drama and evokes storytelling. The results are magical – from the glimmer from city street windows to asphalt reflecting streetlights after a rainstorm.
Her training helps her select the hero in her work and clarifies which details to focus on. The color, line and composition support that focus. Kathryn prefers oils for their vibrant colors and ability for easy glazing and layering.
Happiest when painting, Kathryn is in studio seven days a week.
“How often do people do things that light them up?” she asks. “Me, I’m the lucky one. I get to go to this special place and create, and there’s nothing like it in the world. It’s so rewarding. So personal. So amazing. That people also connect with my work is a bonus.”
Kathryn started selling at art shows initially in the Hamptons and has since expanded to include Rose Squared Art Shows.
“I really liked Rose Squared shows,” she said. “The patrons are real art enthusiasts. It’s a wide, diverse, educated group.”
Find Kathryn’s booth at Crafts at the Cathedral, December 5-7, 2025. Saint John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Ave at 112th Street, New York, NY 10025.
