KRIS RINGMAN is a deaf artist, author, and wanderer.
Her paternal family came from Sweden & Finland before they immigrated to America, so the title of this site draws upon these origins as well as her studies in Norse shamanism and the fox as one of her animal familiars.
Kris is perpetually inspired by animals, nature, world mythology, and her wanderings to far off countries like India, Thailand, and Iceland.
Acrylic paint is her current preferred medium and she loves to paint on wood panels & wood rounds. Kris uses 16 gauge copper wire for hanging most of her paintings and leather cording for the smallest ones. She’s been drawn to metallic accents lately, so many of her paintings have copper painted edges.
Her favorite visual artists include Frida Kahlo, John Bauer, Alice Neel, Vincent van Gogh, Caravaggio, Susan Dupor, Susan Seddon Boulet, Wyland, and many others.
Kris wants to stretch the ways that color can accentuate the lights and darks of a painting while always painting eyes staring out to give the canvas a life—a unique spirit of its own. Kris is obsessed with the intersection of animal and human, nature and human, spirit and human—the ways that all of us must learn to shapeshift in response to the challenges we face throughout our lives—the ways we must find the things we lost when we separated ourselves from nature.
Kris believes most of the answers to life’s greatest questions can be found in nature, so when she’s not painting or writing, she’s wandering in the woods or swimming in a lake or the ocean.
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Kristen is also the author of two Lambda Literary Finalist books: I STOLE YOU: Stories from the Fae (Handtype Press 2017) and MAKARA: a novel (Handtype Press 2012):