Bio / CV

Kristen Margiotta is a Delaware based oil painter, artist, and art educator with 20 years of professional experience. She has been creating art since her childhood, and pursued an education at the University of Delaware where she studied both commercial illustration and crossed over into fine arts classes. Her education continued as she studied on her own post graduation in 2005, establishing a more clearly defined drawing and painting curriculum which still continues to practice with her students to this day. 

Her narrative oil paintings combine imagination with a realistic portrayal of her chosen subject matter. Fire, dripping pearl tears, and white lilies are abound in her work. Themes as transformation, love, and loss, are wound up as powerful amalgamations, birthing beautiful imagery with provocative messages. Her previous body of work focussed on “big eyed” characters in unsettling environments, which also crossed over into published children’s books for about fifteen years. 

Margiotta’s work went through a transformation, as a reflection of personal and intimate experiences in recent years. It is only natural that her work would shift, as her personal life had shifted. She’s returned to her roots of realism, but not limited to the confines of reality. Her work is heavily inspired by the old masters, and art history, specifically the drama of the Baroque era and devotional artwork, which she fuses with her own modern day interpretations and internal dialogue.

Margiotta often paints herself as subject, as well as people she is very close with, as their personal experiences, tie into her own. She is also known for her “alla prima” portrait paintings, a time honored tradition of painting models directly from life, with rapid, intentional brush strokes, completed in one session.

Margiotta currently lives in Newark, Delaware with her boyfriend, and stray cats, where she works and teaches art privately from her home art studio.

“No one does RED like her ”- Scott Kirschner, painter, Arch Enemy Arts.

“Wonderfully painted, big-eyed, and dark ”- Ray Nichols, owner Lead Graffiti (Letterpress Studio).

“This was the most ambitious Delaware Fun-A-Day project I have seen completed  ”. - Monika Bullette, co-founder Delaware Fun-A-Day.

“ Kristen's children's book illustration style is completely unique. Cute, creepy, and full of minute detail, displaying Kristen's mastery of subtle light and shadow. When you see one of her originals, you know it's unmistakably hers.

Her fine art easel paintings are bold, predominantly red and black, and full of emotion brought forth with confident, succulent brushwork not unlike the bravura of the great John Singer Sargent. Kristen’s forte is portraiture and she captures the true spirit of her sitters along with their accurate likenesses. There’s an “old master” quality to these pieces, a chiaroscuro which demonstrates a knowledge of art history and a maturity in skill usually found in older artists.” - Mark Collins, Illustrator, Children's Book Author.