Abstract painter Karin Davie was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1965. She received her BFA degree in 1987 from Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, and an MFA in 1989 from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island. She has been a visiting lecturer at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Davie uses the stripe, popular for decades with geometric abstractionists, and turns it into an organic, active pattern. "I liked using something very familiar, like the stripe, that had been used in popular culture," says Davie. Also influenced by modernist choreographer Trisha Brown, Davie uses her entire body to create enormous canvases. She says, "It's like a dance, in a sense--the movement, the p...