I revel in the moments that hover between asleep and awake, when what’s left of dreams is winding its way out the dimly grayed space where our heads lay and just before all the colors bleed from our mystical beings, metamorphosing selves and physics defied to reveal lucidity. These moments are a suspension of sensory perception (and consequent self-awareness) that lets the brain continue forming images, sounds, tactile journeys the same seemingly random way dreams do, but in a scape that I can study, memorize and later recreate through both visual and musical composition. I am fascinated by the mathematics of aesthetics both aural and visual. The correlations between light wave and sound wave frequencies have endlessly intrigued me to the point of laying out my own graphs of the six (primary & secondary) colors and their relation to the 12 half-tones of the western musical scale. My abstract paintings delve into interpretations of musical works, not just by way of the "light" or "mood" that a musical work conveys emotionally but also through the basic connections of sound waves to color, or rhythm and motivic structure to plot points on a two-dimensional canvas. My more surreal and skewed-perspective pieces depict the strange and whimsical life-forms, environments and moods that I encounter in my own personal gray space just before I wake. I am a self-taught artist from Seattle, currently residing in Washington DC. I've been inventing strange characters and drawing and/or painting them since I was old enough to hold a crayon. Growing up, my family struggled to make ends meet... My father worked numerous jobs all over the Puget Sound area, including one as a janitor for a large paper company. He would bring home scraps and samples from the factory and I would spend hours drawing and doodling, filling up every square inch of paper. That's how it all began! Today I am an accomplished painter who is just getting started participating in juried exhibitions and artists' markets, offering my figments up for the masses. I am employed by day as a graphic designer for a global risk management firm. Before I left Seattle six years ago, I earned five college degrees in Music Theory & Composition, Audio Engineering/Production, Audio Recording, MIDI Music Synthesis as well as an Associate's degree in Mathematics & Computer Science. In my spare time I write and produce music for independent films, and I play the violin for the local Gothic-Americana/Folk Noir Rock band, American Sinner. We are due to release our second album in just a few short weeks! I need to paint something for the album cover! I own a record label based in Seattle called "Qrissy". The label has been on hiatus since relocating to Washington DC, but some of my personal music compositions can be found at Qrissy.com as well as MySpace/Qrissy. I am a participant/member of ArtDC.org (a local artist's forum), The DC Conspiracy (a local collective of comic book writers illustrators & publishers), the Adams Morgan Songwriters' Workshop, both the DC & Baltimore 48 Hour Film Projects and the national 24-Hour Comics Day. I also knit and crochet (I'm new, & still learning) and can be found on Ravelry.Com! I also edit two DC-based audio podcasts: Television Zombies and Hello Craft. I and my numerous shenanigans can be tracked on MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal & Twitter. e-mail: kd@krissydowning.com telephone: (202) 386-1854