Blue Plate Special, Private Collection of the Ferndale Public Library.
Students with their work, Northern Michigan, 2024.
Students with their work, Northville, MI. October, 2024.
Students with their work, Northport Arts Center.
Northport, MI. August, 2023.
Students with their work, Anton Center for the Arts, MI 2025.
5th Grade Students, Detroit Country Academy, February 2025
5th Grade Students, Detroit Country Academy, February 2025
Mrs. Parks, Detroit Country Academy. Feb, 2025
Improv On Canvas Workshop at the Village Arts Factory , Canton, Michigan, Spring 2025
Paint Creek Center for the Arts,
May 2025
Improv On Canvas, My Art Studio, June 2025
Come paint with Kathy! Improv on Canvas Workshop at the Village Arts Factory, Canton, Michigan, Summer 2026
I reside in two worlds. One as a composer of music and one as a composer of art. Growing up in Detroit in the 1960s, I was serenaded by many forms of music and I specially soaked up modern jazz and American classics. In my 20’s, I performed as a lead singer in a rhythm and blues band and toured nationally. That propelled me to an award-winning career as a composer and performer of jazz and soul music. I’ve recorded six albums and eight singles and have performed throughout the United States and internationally from Beijing to London. Since 2014, I have become an interdisciplinary artist, merging music and creating improvisational art on the stage, a presentation that blends my two loves, singing and painting. I am self taught, both as an artist and as a vocalist/composer. I hear color and see sound and translate them both onto the canvas. Whether composing music, or creating visual art, different periods of Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Thelonius Monk, the Jazz Crusaders, Roy Eyers and Donald Byrd, inform my technique allowing me the space in which to improvise what I am hearing, onto the canvas. I also channel modern-day innovators such as Esperanza Spalding ,Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington. Immersing myself in their work helps elevate me to a place where I can let my own voice come through. All of these artists and the like, have influenced and inspired my music compositions and my visual artwork and helps guide me when collaborating with others. I carry that creative fervor into my private life, as I mentor students in the creative arts.KATHY KOSINS JAZZ IN THE ABSTRACT
Kathy Kosins is a master of improvisation. A critically acclaimed jazz vocalist, composer, and visual artist, she moves fluidly between music and painting, translating the spontaneous language of one art form into another.
“For me, art and music are one and the same,” Kosins says. “There’s no separation, and there never has been.”
A self-taught artist on both stage and canvas, Kosins creates original acrylic paintings on canvas, plexiglass, wood, and other surfaces. Her work is deeply influenced by mid-century modern design and the abstract and surrealist movements of the 1950s and ’60s. She cites Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell among the artists who have influenced her visual vocabulary.
Kosins studied liberal arts in college but never formally studied music or art. Nevertheless, both disciplines have become defining forces in her life and career.
“My artwork is total improvisation,” she explains. “There is no preconceived composition.”
At most, Kosins may select a color palette before beginning. The rest unfolds intuitively, in the moment. That philosophy became the foundation for her unique practice of painting from the stage.
While performing at a small performing arts space in Nebraska, Kosins was invited by the artistic director to paint live during a multidisciplinary performance. She accepted the challenge—and discovered a new artistic language. She has continued painting during performances ever since.
Those who have witnessed Kosins perform and paint know they are seeing something rare. As musicians improvise on stage, Kosins responds with color, movement, texture, and gesture, creating an abstract visual interpretation of the music as it happens.
Kosins describes the experience simply: she “hears color and sees sound.”
Her paintings are not illustrations of songs. They are spontaneous visual compositions created in real time, with every stroke informed by the rhythm, dynamics, harmony, and emotional character of the music. In this sense, each painting becomes its own kind of solo—an improvisation expressed through brush, color, and canvas rather than voice or instrument.
“Art sets me free,” Kosins says. “It is an out-of-body experience for me—at once completely different from and an extension of music. It exists without the stress of touring or rehearsing.”
For her live painting performances, Kosins works with a deliberately limited palette and foam brushes, using her music stand as an easel. Her canvases are intentionally compact, generally ranging from 12 x 12 to 20 x 20 inches, allowing her entire painting setup to travel with her. More often than not, the finished works are sold directly from the stage—sometimes with the paint still wet.
Kosins’s visual work has been exhibited throughout Michigan and across the United States. Her first solo exhibition was held at State of the Art Gallery in Ferndale, Michigan, in 2008. In 2017, she was a featured artist at the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale University. The following year, she wasfeatured at the Ah Haa School for the Arts in Telluride, Colorado.
Her work has also evolved into immersive, multidisciplinary experiences in which music and visual art are created simultaneously, making the performance itself part concert, part studio, and part spontaneous act of creation.
For Kosins, the connection between music and visual art is not a concept—it is a way of seeing and experiencing the world.
“I don’t think about where the music ends and the art begins,” she says. “They’re both improvisation. They’re both about being completely present in the moment.”
