Fall in love with where you are, one impression at a time.

Buildings hold more than we notice. I paint what’s layered into them. The history, the people, the stories most people have stopped seeing.

“Early Monday Morning” by Nathalie Kalbach, 24x30”Collage, Acrylic Paint, Marker on Canvas

I'm Nathalie Kalbach, a Jersey City-based mixed media painter, writer, and preservation advocate. Working in acrylic, ink, pastel, and collage, I paint urban architecture as archive, tracing the lived histories embedded in the places we pass every day.

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Dispatches from the Sidewalk

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Is the house crookedly smiling? That's what I see, that shift at the corner, where the mansard roof and cornice pull apart. This house has been holding a secret since 1886, when Captain John H. Fenner's daughter Emma eloped after he'd rejected her su
I've been thinking about thresholds lately. The places where you're neither fully in nor fully out. A balcony. A window. A country that sometimes feels like both. This is the first painting in my new series - Inside-Out. "Stepping Out," bal
Four smokestacks, then three, now none. UN-Finished (Past, Present, Future), 30x40", now at @novadogallery If architecture is read like language, smokestacks are punctuation marks that announce "this is an industrial building." Now the
Right now I'm pushing in both directions - some paintings are getting bigger and bolder, while this series goes smaller and more intimate than my usual work. Working at a 5x7 scale means getting closer to the details - the worn railings, the patched
The city lives in our memory as much as in front of our eyes. Fragments that shift and overlap, never quite settling into one clear view. This piece leans into that disorientation, where street scapes, columns, and other architectural elements become
The way we see our neighborhood isn't straightforward -t's fragments, impressions, layers of memory and observation. That's what this new Defragmented series explores on a more intimate 8x8 scale. Gel monoprint with acrylic, ink and marker on panel.
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