Deborah Kerr is a Provincetown-based artist. Kerr, who studied advertising design and production in college found herself increasingly moving from applied art to fine art in her personal life. For the first half of her artistic career she created three-dimensional, functional art. Originally working In wood, metal, paper maché and silicone, Kerr began to work in oils a in her Provincetown studio in 2007.

As a painter, she discovered the “instant gratification” of working in acrylics a few years later. Today, her work often takes on a textural surface quality, with brilliant, saturated color fairly troweled onto the surface. Some mixed-media pieces have begun to include the successful use of collage alongside acrylic, continuing the dimensionality of her paint application.

Her fascination with how the light hits the water here, combined with an admiration for the working boats of Provincetown help inspire her work, just as they have inspired artists for many generations. Generally, Kerr doesn’t set out with a specific image in mind, she allows images to evolve as she paints. In her canvases, Kerr often uses bold swathes of color rather than line to represent shape and structure her compositions. While her work has been for many years intimate in scale, the artist recently found herself inspired by the massively-scaled paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, a scale she’d love to explore.