A black crow presides over a nest stuffed with small treasures: a pocket watch, a key, a green Christmas ornament, bits of colored material whose origins are harder to place. Behind it, a pale-blue sky opens above a sliver of farmland. At first glance, K. K. Kozik’s Collector appears almost storybook-simple. Spend time with it and the scene becomes stranger, more psychologically charged
The 2025 oil painting, which appears on this month’s cover of Chronogram, is included in “The Naturalist,” a five-artist exhibition at Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Kent, Connecticut. It belongs to a larger group of paintings Kozik calls “Route 22,” inspired by the road she has traveled along the western side of the Taconic Mountains for some 40 years.
Over those decades, Kozik, a Sharon resident, has watched the landscape change as she has changed. Now approaching 65, with her children grown and gone from home, she sees stretches of countryside once shaped by farms and families reverting to a wilder state. “Much of that landscape has been abandoned as rural America has been abandoned, but there’s still a lot of beauty to it,” she says. “And the wildlife has come back, which is how the crows come in.”
Kozik thinks of the crow as a magician—and, she came to realize after completing Collector, as an oblique self-portrait. The association fits her description of herself as a “hunter-gatherer” who collects images and experiences, holds them in reserve, and recombines them in the studio.
The nest’s contents also acquired personal meaning after the fact. The watch became an emblem of time, the key suggested home, and the Christmas ornament evoked family celebration. Yet the nest itself contains no eggs or hatchlings. Kozik had been adjusting to her children’s departure when she painted it. “That was something that sort of came out,” she says. “I’m open to my subconscious contributing to what I do.”
The image carries loss, but Kozik resisted making it mournful. She set the crow and its empty nest against a benign blue sky and pastel landscape, counterweights to the painting’s more pensive implications. The result holds the opposing forces that run through much of her recent work: abandonment and renewal, culture and nature, representation and invention.
“In these paintings, it’s nature kind of pushing back,” Kozik says. “These landscapes that were formerly cultivated and lived in are now reverting—or having a renaissance, depending on how you look at it.”
Kozik’s career has ranged across landscapes, domestic interiors, figures, still lifes, works on paper, and public commissions. Her images remain recognizably hers regardless of subject. She attributes that continuity partly to composition: fallen hydrangeas appear upside down, trees press against a canvas edge, or a crow occupies a nest perched high above a distant landscape. She seeks arrangements that make a painting feel active, then combines recognizable imagery with improvisational passages.
“I make abstracted landscapes that are also sort of visionary because of the parts that I make up,” she says. “They speak in a realistic language without being realist—trees, houses, birds.”
She begins without having solved the entire painting, drawing as needed from photographs, observation, sketches, and memory. Specific details may arrive late. What matters is allowing accumulated experience—and sometimes the unconscious—to direct the process.
Kozik sees her earlier paintings as more cerebral and the recent work as more contemplative and open-ended. Age and confidence have helped her loosen her grip. She cites Philip Guston’s famous description of what happens in the studio as a way of thinking about how her practice has deepened over time. “When you start painting, there are all these people in the studio with you—your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics,” Guston said. “And one by one, if you’re really painting, they walk out. And if you’re really lucky, you walk out too.”
Writing, another longstanding medium for Kozik, gives her intellect somewhere else to go. “I like to think about things,” she says, “but is painting the right place to think about them?”
In Collector, thought has not disappeared. It has been transformed into an image: a crow arranging the remnants of human life inside an empty nest, while the land below waits for whatever comes next.
“The Naturalist” remains on view through September 13 at Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Kent, Connecticut.
