Nissa Kauppila

Nissa Kauppila was born and raised in the small, rural town of Monkton, Vermont, USA. She holds both a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.Ed. from the University of Vermont.

Expanding on her sense of curiosity, while exploring the unsettling and concrete, Kauppila has found painting the nature of flight and life a rewarding exercise in rediscovery.

Her immersion in Chinese traditional painting techniques and materials has awakened a sense of detail and fragility; her work explores the use of line and color as tendrils of tension while embodying a sense of wonderment for the natural world. Kauppila reaches beyond perception and disintegrates her subjects in ways that are not actual in her works in traditional Chinese watercolor and ink on traditional Chinese rice paper. Each painting is titled using geographic coordinates—these pertain to either the very location in which the wildlife was observed or where Kauppila was painting at the time. This conscious effort in titling each work in this fashion allows for the painting to speak in terms of location and observation; the viewer thus can form their own emotional connectivity to the theme without initial influence or suggestion. Kauppila’s paintings have been showcased internationally, in Macau, Hong Kong, New York, London, Singapore, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hamburg, Taipei, South Korea, and Guangzhou with current exhibitions and representation in Vermont, Atlanta, Hong Kong, China, and Singapore.

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