Kathy Kosins is a master of improvisation. Her art quite literally translates from stage to canvas. She may be best-known for her successful career as a critically acclaimed jazz vocalist, yet all the while Kosins has been quietly gaining ground in the modern art world as well. “For me, art and music are one in the same,” Kosins says. “There’s no separation and there never has been.” A self-taught artist on both stage and canvas, Kosins creates acrylic paintings on canvas, and occasionally other materials like plexiglass or wood. A mid-century modern aesthetic has long inspired her work. Cubist and surrealist artists of the 1950s and 1960s inform her technique. She’s a self-confessed devotee of such abstract impressionists as Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning or Robert Motherwell. Kosins studied liberal arts in college, but never formally studied art or music. Still, she’s made a decades-long career in those fields. “My artwork is total improvisation,” she says. “There is no preconceived composition.” At most, Kosins may choose a color palette ahead of time. She believes in creating art when the moment strikes. That is exactly how she began painting from a live music stage. “I was performing in a small performing arts space in Nebraska when the artistic director asked me to paint from the stage as a multi-disciplined event,” she recalls. “I agreed, and have been doing this at nearly every performance since.” Those who have had the opportunity to see Kosins perform - and paint on stage - know it’s a rarity. Kosins often says she “hears color and sees sound,” a condition known as synesthesia. As the band continues to play an impromptu instrumental on stage, she applies color and strokes - each inspired by the visual interpretation of the music. The end result is an abstraction of the music being played. But it’s even more than that for Kosins. “Art sets me free,” she says. “It is an out-of-body experience for me – at once completely different than and an extension of music. It exists without the stress of touring or rehearsing.”