Stephanie Rado Taormina
Wyomissing, PA
Contemporary artist exploring abstraction, color, and perception through layered, atmospheric paintings that balance gesture, structure, and emotion.
Message
Stephanie Rado Taormina is a contemporary artist whose work explores abstraction, color, and the emotional landscape of being seen. Working across painting and mixed media, she creates layered compositions that move between gesture and atmosphere, balancing structure with release.
Her recent work reflects a shift toward openness and clarity, where color field and intuitive mark-making intersect to create paintings that hold space—both visually and emotionally. Alongside her abstract practice, she develops figurative works that examine identity, perception, and the tension between external image and internal experience.
With a background in fashion and over two decades as an interior designer, Taormina brings a refined understanding of composition, material, and spatial impact to her work. This foundation informs her ability to create paintings that not only express but also live powerfully within a space.
Her work has been exhibited in New York and Pennsylvania and is held in private collections.
She divides her time between New York City and Pennsylvania, where she continues to develop new bodies of work.
Statement
My work explores abstraction as a way of understanding what is felt but not easily named. Through color, gesture, and layering, I create compositions that move between presence and dissolution—where forms emerge, shift, and recede without fixed resolution.
In my recent work, I’ve been drawn to a greater sense of openness. Color field and intuitive mark-making intersect to create space—both visual and emotional—where the painting can breathe. I’m less interested in control and more interested in allowing the work to unfold, responding to what is already there rather than forcing an outcome.
Alongside this, my figurative pieces examine identity and perception—what it means to be seen, and how we construct or obscure ourselves in that process. These works hold a different tension, where the human presence remains visible yet unsettled.
Across both practices, painting becomes a conversation between structure and release, clarity and disruption. Each piece carries the residue of its own making—an accumulation of decisions, revisions, and moments of uncertainty that ultimately shape the final image.
I think of my work not as something to be solved, but as something to be experienced—an invitation to pause, to look, and to feel without needing a definitive answer.