kathleen kinkopf cape coral realism collage artist
Photography by Christina Bankson

Kathleen Kinkopf’s Surreal Art Blur Fantasy and Reality

The Cape Coral artist layers painting, poetry and digital design into dreamlike compositions full of symbolism and emotion.

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Kathleen Kinkopf’s Cape Coral studio is layered with the building blocks of her creations. Sliced cardstock forms sit alongside digital renderings with grid lines and notes scrawled at the margins. Curling tubes of acrylic paint lie neatly near sketchbooks that bleed with graphite figures and fragments of poetry in progress. A desktop opened to Adobe Photoshop serves as a digital canvas for experimentation and iteration.  

Here, the painter, illustrator and digital artist blends the disparate bits of media, forming collaged compositions inspired by her dreams. Fantastical narratives filled with flowers, horses and ethereal female forms take shape slowly, thoughtfully.

The Midwestern transplant borrows from the literary tradition of magical realism to describe her work. Her tableaux blend precise anatomies, otherworldly colors, dreamlike details and impossible settings that pulse with symbolism and storytelling. Grounded markers (flora, fauna and figures) offer familiarity; surrealist elements fuel subconscious emotion. 

Years ago, Kathleen sold a painting of two birds among an explosion of florals to a young woman. The client wept when she saw the piece, but couldn’t articulate why. Similar responses surface now and then, and they don’t surprise the artist. She thinks of her transportive, storybook-like works as messages for those she hasn’t yet met, knowing that in the moment when reality relaxes its grip, something deeper can emerge. The pieces carry the escapist energy that drew her to art as a child.

Shy by nature, Kathleen was the youngest child in her family and most of the kids in her small town. She spent much of her time in solitude with nature, indulging her imagination. With the horse she received at age 13, Kathleen would roam flat stretches of Northeast Ohio, imagining palaces and enchanted meadows in place of barren farmland. Her childhood musings manifest today as portals to countless dreamscapes.

After the 2008 financial crisis, when she focused her energies on graphic design work to support herself, Kathleen began incorporating digital mediums into her process. Rather than sketching each element by hand, she started using design software to mock up her whimsical artworks.

The digital evolution accelerated with her 2019 move to Southwest Florida. Soon after, amid the isolation and quietude of the COVID-19 shutdowns, she found the time and space to hone the digital techniques she’d been developing for years.   

The journey of discovery rings out in the pages of her award-winning 2021 poetry and digital collage book, Inhabiting Bliss. On one page, two cerulean busts, topped with tangles of subtropical flora, appear connected by the neck against a hazy, pastoral landscape. Beside the image is a short poem that Kathleen says came to her in the dead of night: Sometimes, when I’m trying to find myself, I’m already right in front of me.

Throughout her life, the artist has always sought a sense of belonging, carving out her place from one city to the next. While earning degrees in advertising and fine art at Miami University in Ohio, she found the most value in self-study, reflecting on the masters. “Realism was not popular or taught in depth when I went to school,” she says. 

Kathleen read up on Renaissance greats, surrealists, Mexican muralists, impressionist icons and modern realists—drawing lessons in light and anatomy from the Italians and a concept-driven approach from the surrealists. While in Breckenridge, Colorado, she opened a gallery and forged her own creative community, representing 25 contemporary and folk artists from the U.S. and beyond. Later, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she devoted herself to painting full-time and shared her work through exhibitions, from Santa Fe to South Korea.

Today, she’s finding her place along the Gulf Coast, emerging from her cocoon through shows and connecting with other local artists. In last year’s Allegories & Illusions at Fort Myers’ Alliance for the Arts, Kathleen debuted Living Inside a Dream, a painting with sunlight streaming across a seabed, where a spectral horse emerges amid wisps of anemone and rose blooms. The water is almost amniotic, as two female figures float in the foreground, hugging their knees close. Women are central to her work, functioning as mirrors where the artist and viewers can see themselves within the fantasy. “They feel so powerful but also nurturing,” she says. “Whatever environment they’re in, they feel like they’re weaving it together.”  

Wherever she finds herself, Kathleen continues to map the distance between reality and dream. Her setting and materials may differ—from Ohio meadows and acrylics to Southwest Florida shores, armed with paint, pixels and poetry—but the instinct remains: art as escape. Each composition opens onto a place where the boundaries between human and nature, waking and dreaming, dissolve, inviting reflection and a return to childlike wonder.