About
I'm obsessed with the gap between a face and what it can tell us. The human face is where we look for truth, for someone's real self. But faces lie. They're sculpted by light, habit, what we expect to see.
Paint doesn't lie like that. A brushstroke can hold more honesty than an eye. Color can say what a mouth won't. When I paint, I'm not trying to capture how someone looks — I'm looking for how emotion lives, in the mess, the gesture, the effort of making.
I paint so you'll feel that moment. When you see past the face and into something more real. Not who someone is to the world, but who they are in a moment of being truly seen.
Kate Rootman's portrait paintings begin with a question she has been asking for over thirty years: what does a face actually tell us? Working in acrylic — on canvas, paper, and Masonite — she builds images that resist the easy legibility of a likeness, reaching instead for the emotional truth that conventional portraiture tends to smooth away.
Born and raised in Vancouver, Rootman trained across institutions on three continents: Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and Camberwell College of Arts and London College of Communications, where she completed an MA in Publishing Production. For the next two decades, she worked at the intersection of creativity and strategy — in publishing and corporate innovation — while continuing to make work. In 2025, she returned to painting in earnest.
Her portraits are made from life and from memory. The scale of each painting is deliberate: a 14×20 demands a different kind of intimacy than a 24×30. The faces that emerge are not records of how someone looks, but of how it feels to be in their presence — to see, and to be seen.
Rootman divides her time between Vancouver, Toronto, and Palm Springs, California.
© Kate Rootman. All works reserved.
