Kirsten Deirup, a New York-based artist, crafts surreal, sometimes unsettling paintings that toy with perspective and expectations. At times, the viewer may be unsure of what the creatures or objects at the center of her works are in truth. Yet, the engrossing quality to her works carries through.
The New York City-based Nicelle Beauchene Gallery once offered this on the artist’s mysterious pieces: “Kirsten Deirup’s paintings explore a territory where theater, religious reverie and dystopia comingle. Accentuating uneasy relationships between reality, the subconscious and artifice, Deirup renders disjointed stage sets as portraiture that remain void of direct figuration. Playing upon the ineluctable flatness of the surfaces, Deirup’s irrational portraits invite confusion as she oscillates between the uses of two- and three-dimensional space.”
Even as the artist’s work has since evolved, she still seems to use both real and emulated material to construct beings and worlds that move beyond explanation.
Underwater photographer 
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In what the artist himself calls "homespun faerie tales",