About Marjorie Kitchen
Marjorie Kitchen grew up in the bucolic farming community of Clarence, New York, where you could roll a bowling ball down Transit Road without fear of hitting a soul. She began her formal training at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City in the 1980s before returning home to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Today, Kitchen lives and works in Pensacola, Florida, with her husband and their two spirited chihuahuas, Chauncey and Salty. For the past eleven years, she has immersed herself fully in surrealist portraiture, creating intimate, psychologically layered works that blend classical technique with raw, expressive energy.
Working primarily in oil on canvas—as well as watercolor, acrylic, and oil pastel on paper—Kitchen’s paintings exist in the tension between precision and intuition. Her portraits wrestle with the hidden self: the elusive “who” that lives inside each of us—the “ghost in the machine.” Guided by intuition and memory, she often applies paint directly with her fingers, letting impressions from the depths of lived experience rise to the surface. A signature technique involves “staining” the canvas: she lays down the paint, then swiftly lifts it away with linen, leaving behind luminous, ethereal traces of color that feel both present and ghostly.
This deeply personal approach has earned recognition, including her portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, which resides in the permanent collection of the Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo, New York.
Kitchen’s work invites viewers to pause and look closer—not just at a face, but at the mysterious inner life shimmering beneath it.
Exhibits
Artel Gallery, Pensacola, Florida “Wildflowers,” February 17-March 27, 2026
Artel Gallery, Pensacola, Florida-Best in Show Winner for “Choices You Make” Exhibit January 6-February 13, 2026
East Aurora Art Sale, East Aurora, New York June 29-30, 2024
Burchfield Nature and Art Center, West Seneca, New York June 19-July 30, 2023
West Seneca Chamber of Commerce, West Seneca, New York March 11-June 10, 2023
Artist Statement
Marjorie Kitchen works across oil, watercolor, and graphite, united by an unflinching attention to the human figure. Enriching her surfaces with gold leaf, copper leaf, and mixed media, she explores identity, memory, and the luminous quality of the everyday.
Her subjects range from intimate portraits and classical religious iconography to contemporary figures rendered with quiet monumentality. Whether working at intimate scale on paper or across canvases spanning five feet or more, Kitchen brings the same intensity to each piece — a conviction that the face and form carry within them both the personal and the universal.
Rooted in a deep love of the figurative tradition yet unafraid of the contemporary, her work moves fluidly between tenderness and gravitas, between the sacred and the immediate.