Kate Breakey is a contemporary Australian artist who creates delicately hand-painted photographs of birds, flowers, insects, and landscapes. Often rendered in warm yellow tones, her images seek to evoke both the mystery and power of the natural world, and have been featured in such publications as Small Deaths, Painted Light, and Slow Light. “I begin with a silver photographic image, a kind of evidence,” she has explained of her intricate process. “Then I paint on this in many transparent layers of oil paint and pencil. If I am lucky, the media combine and become enmeshed, a curious union of what was real with my own exaggerations and embellishments.” She has also used photograms, wherein she places an object onto a sheet of photosensitive paper and exposes it to light, thereby creating white silhouetted images against black backgrounds. Born on August 14, 1957 in Adelaide, Australia, Breakey studied art at the University of Southern Australia before moving to Austin, TX in 1988, where she attended the University of Texas and received her MFA in 1991. Breakey’s works are in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego among others. In 2004, she received the Photographer of the Year Award from the Houston Center for Photography. The artist lives and works in Tucson, AZ.