Kay Canavino has been exploring themes of the natural world via fine art photography for over twenty years. Her original images are hauntingly beautiful with a mysterious quality; there is a surface tranquility that belies a deeper, edgy truth.

Born in Charleston, SC, Kay Canavino lived in New York City before moving to Manhattan, Illinois, a small farm community outside of Chicago. She grew up in natural surroundings that provided a major influence for her photography. (She still remembers taking her first photograph at age eight, creating a still-life setup of an artfully placed dead butterfly a potted poinsetta plant.)

From Illinois, Kay moved to Boston and graduated from Northeastern University. Motivated by working with photographs in the Boston Globe library, she received a Professional Diploma from the New England School of Photography and began her serious pursuit of photography.

One of the founders of the Brickbottom Artists Building in Somerville, Massachusetts, Kay established her studio there and participated in numerous Open Studios. She became actively involved in Somerville Arts Council events, including the popular Somerville Garden Awards. Her work with the Arts Council led her to experimentation with alternative processes, such as photo transfer images and hand-colored black and white prints, and she began to successfully exhibit her fine art photography. After too long a period without trees, Kay moved to the Berkshires in 2002. In 2003 she set up her studio in the former East Renfrew schoolhouse in Adams, Massachusetts.

In contrast to her commercial work, her fine art photography is mostly organic: a vanitas series with plant and animal parts, a series of hand-colored photographs of urban gardens, Polaroid transfer images of flowers and fish, pinhole and 3-D landscapes, night landscapes and night portraits using light-painting techniques. In the last few years, she has completed a series of aerial abstract landscapes, from hot air balloons and small planes. Most recently, she has completed a collaborative project working with an abstract painter interpreting Herman Melville's life in the Berkshires.

Her photographs have been exhibited in national and regional juried shows and her work is included in corporate, museum and private collections.

Kay Canavino's fine art portfolio can be viewed by appointment. Also, she accepts commissions, such as photographing people in their homes or gardens.

Limited edition prints of selected images are available for collectors and are shown on this website.