Kyla Zoe Rafert is an artist living in rural central Ohio. She paints intricately rendered and heavily patterned fairytale-like scenes of girls and women using a combination of walnut ink, gouache and screen printing on paper. Her fraught experience with adolescence, feminine ideals, perfectionism and beauty remain recurring themes in her work. Now a mother of two young girls, her work is evolving to incorporate themes of motherhood and the undercurrent of anxiety she experiences raising a family in this world of political tensions and environmental destruction, not to mention the impossible myriad of roles laid on women these days. 

 

When Kyla is not painting, she is busy raising up two young girls and tending to a 5 acre homestead with her loving husband, Eric. There, they raise chickens, sheep, and sometimes goats, and have a large kitchen garden. Her adventures in animal husbandry and motherhood provide ample inspiration for her paintings and hold her heart and mind intimately to the cycles of life and all the wisdom that entails.