Whispers from the Wild

A local artist draws creative inspiration from nature and biology

words Grace Adele Boyle

Drifting through dark, snowy woods on a starlit night, Katrina Kingfisher saw an ethereal being made of starlight—a snow leopard—descending from the sky and settling silently in the forest. Looking up, the leopard watched fireballs spin overhead. “How beautiful,” she thought, “I have to sketch this.” For the first time in an hour, Katrina opened her eyes, the minor key of her roommate’s gong bath still vibrating through the house as the session neared its end. She reached for her sketchbook and captured what she had seen in that dreamlike state. The next week, she began painting the scene. “It felt like the snow leopard had this ancient knowledge, like it was watching the sky thinking, ‘Yes, I have been waiting for this for eons,’ and I wanted to express that feeling,” she says.

Katrina is a Boulder-based artist working across murals, canvas, live painting, tattoo design, 3D nature collage, and face painting. She explores creativity as a practice of reverence—an act that turns inner vision into shared feeling.

Her highly detailed, realistic renderings of plants and animals transcend a single medium, allowing her to express her inner visions through multiple artistic outlets: 3D nature collages incorporating moss and skulls, canvas paintings, large-scale murals, tattoo design, and live painting at events—on both canvas and faces. Nature and biology are the common thread throughout her work, serving as both subject and inspiration. Her love of animals and the natural world was fostered from a young age by her artist mother, who took Katrina on walks through the woods, teaching her the names of plants and birds. Together they observed fox families, banks cut by creeks through the seasons, and forest creatures at every stage of existence, learning to appreciate the full life cycle: birth, life, death, and decay.

Katrina further nurtured this connection, earning a degree in aquatic biology and later working as a wilderness survival instructor, deepening both her knowledge of and reverence for the natural world. It wasn’t until her husband encouraged her to take her art seriously, seeing the response it evoked in people, that Katrina started selling her art—work that has since become recognizable to many in Boulder’s creative community. Her painting “Awakening,” depicting a mystical deer emerging from the woods, was displayed at Myco Café and became one of her most iconic local pieces.

“I want people to feel deeply when they look at my art. Each painting I make has a piece of my soul in it, but I often prefer to hear people’s experience of a painting before I give them mine,” Katrina says. “I get all kinds of very different reactions. I love that someone can have a deep, evocative experience when they look at what I created.”

Katrina often returns to a metaphor: the love triangle, a three-way relationship among the creator, the artwork, and the viewer. The creator and the art have a relationship that brings the art to life—a form of self-expression and discovery—and once alive, the art forms relationships with countless viewers, independent of its creator.

Her art and life play with these dynamics, inviting inspiration, creation, and the viewer into the creative dance. She has found ways to sustain both creativity and connection through backpacking, foraging, meditation, and time spent in nature, as well as through live painting at festivals and events, where viewers witness her creation in real time and experience the process as both viewer and, with facepainting, the art itself. 

Readers can experience Katrina’s artwork around Boulder at music festivals, community events, commissioned murals and tattoos, and through her online portfolio, where prints and originals are available.

For more information, visit faunaflowart.com and coloradofacepainting.com.