Kaylie Boyle is a multidisciplinary artist based in Taos, New Mexico, originally from Omaha, Nebraska. Her work draws from a deeply personal journey, shaped by time spent in Oahu, Hawaii, where she reconnected with painting.
Her current project, Sorrowful Joy, explores the tension between grief and rapture through a limited palette of yellow and black. Yellow, inspired by its use in Buddhist mourning traditions, becomes a disruptive light within sorrow, a reminder of joy’s presence even in pain. Black, by contrast, embodies rapture: the quiet end, untouched by emotion. Together, these colors create a visual language of duality, underscoring the ambiguity of beauty and its connection to suffering.

Birds are recurring figures in her work, symbolizing emotional states and transformation. Their seven-stage life cycle mirrors the expanded stages of grief, while their synchronized flight patterns inspire compositions reminiscent of Baroque trompe-l'œil paintings. Like molting birds, Boyle sees grief as a shedding process,raw, necessary, and rebirthing new life.

Whether in ink, yellow paint, or film, she creates bold, textural pieces led by intuition and play. Her process embraces imperfection, allowing vulnerability to take form. At its core, her work challenges the viewer to find joy within sorrow; "sorrowful yet always rejoicing." Boyle believes joy is an act of resistance, and that true beauty lies not in perfection, but in the honest revelation of the shared human experience of living. This is the mission behind all of her work, soaring across disciplines. Beauty is not a means to an ending. It’s ambiguous in nature, and it can never truly mean one thing. True beauty is in the revelation of suffering.