Keren Toledano is a self-taught painter based in New York City. She received her BA in English from Harvard and her MA in Arts & Education from NYU. After graduation, she worked as a literary agent, editor, journalist and writing teacher, while pursuing her own short fiction. When writer’s block hit, she turned to painting as a means of expression in the absence of a formal language. In her first solo show in 2017, she coupled abstract collage with excerpts from her torn up stories—a reminder never to marry her darlings. 

In addition to collaborations with designers, retailers and art publishers, her work has been featured in publications such as Vogue and The New York Times, and at international design fairs. She now splits her time between painting and writing, finding connections across disciplines.

There is no story without elements in tension. Transparent and opaque, smooth and textured— each aspect amplifies the qualities of the other. The painting is always a palimpsest, a document of layers that build on one another. As a creative writer, I am interested in the overlap of story and image, the ways in which specific marks invoke a pre-linguistic syntax. Stains on raw canvas as adjectives, hard-lined shapes as concrete nouns. What seems most solid is a mere reaction to what lies beneath. 

My current work evolved from this contemplation--that the eye and brain conspire to make meaning, but are often fooled by a moment in context. The invitation is to explore our perspective. In life, as in art, our interpretive lens is uniquely distorted, shaped by the marks on our own palimpsest.