About Todd Kruse

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I’ve been drawn to powerful visual art for as long as I can remember—but it wasn’t until later in life that I began making it seriously. Today, painting is both a passion and a way of thinking. I’m not chasing perfection or easy beauty. I’m after innovation, intensity, and that hard-to-describe feeling when a work grabs you and won’t let go.

 

Many of my abstract paintings begin with impulse—bold shapes, spontaneous marks—but they evolve through obsessive refinement. I often get lost in the details, pushing and pulling the image until something strange and original begins to emerge. I’m interested in tension: chaos and structure, calm and overload, surface and depth. Sometimes my paintings are unsettling, even for me—but I believe that’s where the interesting work lives.

 

I was raised in Kansas, served nine years in the Army Infantry (including combat in Iraq), and now work in high tech as a Product Manager. My art training has been almost entirely self-directed—rooted in museum visits, books, late-night experiments, and relentless iteration. I’ve created hundreds of works over the past few decades, constantly questioning what makes a painting meaningful, memorable, or new.

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I don’t make art to match furniture or trends. I make it to explore, disrupt, and connect. If something in my work slows you down or makes you curious—that’s a success.