Katelin Schutt, Nashville Figurative and Landscape Artist
Hi, I’m Katelin Schutt, a Nashville-area contemporary painter creating original oil paintings and works on paper from my studio in Thompson’s Station, Tennessee.
My work has been exhibited at Pearview Gallery and Electric Shed, included in pARTisan at David Lusk Gallery, featured in Arts to Hearts Magazine, and collected across the Southeast. My 2026 exhibition, Metanoia: A Change of Heart/Mind, was selected as a Critic’s Pick by the Nashville Scene.
I make paintings for people drawn to beauty with substance: art that feels timeless while holding mystery, memory, and emotional depth. I paint figures, Southern landscapes, interiors, heirloom still lifes, and ancestral portraits. Though the subject changes, each painting attends to a threshold between what has been and what is becoming.
View available original paintings
If you’re curious to hear more, join my collector’s list here.
Paintings of memory, place, and transformation
I call the framework that holds my practice together “Threshold States.”
Some paintings move through figures, caves, veils, shadow, water, and firelight. Others begin in gardens, old houses, family photographs, children at play, and the dense green landscape of the South.
I am interested in the moment when ordinary life becomes charged: light passing through leaves, a figure half-seen, a room holding the memory of someone who lived there, or an inherited object that feels more alive than it should.
Motherhood made that attention more urgent. Children grow, seasons turn, gardens overtake their boundaries, and familiar places become former versions of themselves while we are still living in them.
I want a painting to work from across the room, then reveal more as you come closer. The longer you live with it, the more it should have to say.
At the center of my work is transformation, not as a dramatic before and after, but as the quiet and uncertain middle. These paintings make room for the parts of a life that are difficult to name and impossible to separate from beauty.
An Appalachian inheritance
I come from Appalachian people, and that inheritance lives in the way I see the world.
I grew up in Southwest Virginia, foraging for morel mushrooms each spring as my family had done before me. Each year, I return to my alma mater, Sewanee, to see the wildflowers blooming in Shakerag Hollow.
That lifelong attention to fleeting beauty, seasonal change, and the sacredness of ordinary life deeply informs my paintings. It is why I return again and again to what vanishes, what returns, what we inherit, and what changes us.
This inheritance also lives in my Lost and Found portraits. Painted from family photographs on quilting fabric, these works bring ancestry into the present as something felt and living rather than distant history.
A practice grounded in craft and attention
My practice is grounded in serious study and a deep commitment to craft. I studied figure drawing with Steve Huston, and I continue to build each painting through observation, drawing, composition, color, and material.
I have also been a musician, baker, farmer, and teacher. Each role shaped the artist I am now. They taught me discipline, sensitivity, curiosity, and how to return to the work again and again.
Much of my earliest drawing practice grew from the boredom of being an only child. I still consider boredom one of the great gifts life has to offer. It creates the silence in which attention begins.
Collecting original paintings from my Nashville-area studio
Original paintings and works on paper are available directly through my studio. I welcome in-person studio visits near Nashville as well as virtual appointments for collectors farther away.
Wondering how a painting would look in your space? I offer complimentary room mockups. Send me a photograph of your wall and its approximate dimensions, and I will show you the work at scale before you decide.
Request a complimentary mockup
Original oil paintings are varnished when appropriate, and each work is carefully prepared for display and packed for safe delivery.
I also accept a limited number of commissions, including meaningful landscape paintings and Lost and Found heirloom portraits created from family photographs.
View available original paintings
For private previews, studio invitations, and first access to new work, join my collector’s list and receive Studio Notes.