Kerry
Pastine.

Kerry Pastine doesn't do quiet entries, which makes sense if you grew up fighting for space as a woman in the music industry. She spent twenty years fronting bands like The Crime Scene and The Informants, playing jump blues and garage rock on stages across the world. Critics used to compare her music to a mix of Wanda Jackson and Joan Jett. When a writer calls your music "slashing," you are doing something right.

Painting entered her life nine years ago as a way to process the tension and ground herself during a period of forced isolation from the road. She began painting everyday subjects immediately within her view. What started purely as a coping mechanism to calm her nerves and process difficult emotions quickly evolved into an entirely new visual language and art form that she needed to explore.

Moving into fine art wasn't a hard pivot from music; it was just a translation of the same impulse. The same energy she put into her singing goes into the brushstrokes now. She treats her art studio exactly like she treated the stage.

In January 2024, she moved from Denver to Lisbon, Portugal. Her 2019 album City of Love was all about change and wanting to be somewhere else. Now she lives there. She and her husband had been searching for a place that felt right during their tours, and Lisbon immediately clicked as a small, artistic city that still felt cosmopolitan.

The move changed her paintings. Denver has a sharp, high-altitude light that gave her early work a graphic look. Lisbon's light is softer because of the ocean and the Tagus River. Her newer paintings have more depth and feel less rigid, though they still have an edge. For Pastine, painting the city and its iconic 25th of April Bridge acts as a metaphor for crossing over to a new phase of her life after traveling so far.

Alongside painting, she has worked as a life coach for nearly twenty years and wrote Know Thyself and Take Back Your Self. She got her start doing this specifically for creatives coping with various industries — restaurants, tech, and galleries — helping people get past their inner critics and access their own tools for growth. Her own art is the perfect example of practicing what she teaches.

She calls her style Retromodernism. It uses mid-century American imagery like neon and bold geometry, but handled through a modern lens. She grew up in the 1960s watching shows like The Jetsons and craving that clean, outer-space aesthetic, mixed with the old school cityscapes her parents kept in the house. It is more like the modern vintage that she plays: separate elements from different eras forced to work together in the modern world.

She paints standing up and moving around, trusting her instincts. She has said that she plays the canvas the way she sings, without knowing where it is going until she gets there.