Katie Aronat of Arrowknot Studio (born 1991, Bakersfield, California, USA) is a Chattanooga, Tennessee based abstract artist, primarily creating cut-out style artworks.

With a degree from UCLA in Design | Media Arts, Katie spent 5 years doing graphic design and motion graphics before pivoting to Project Management. To stay creative, she worked on passion projects over the years, most involving a die cutting machine. After discovering her artist hero, Sophie Tea, in London, she was inspired to make her own art.

In 2022, she picked up a paint brush for the first time, creating abstract paintings that played with color. Her design background and experience with the cutting machine eventually converged into her first cut-out artwork experiment in January 2023. This was only the beginning as Aronat enthusiastically continued down this path exploring how overlapping material silhouettes create dimension.

Matisse described his cut-outs as drawing with scissors. I don’t use scissors, but I do use a cutting machine to cut out materials that are arranged into abstract compositions.

My cut-outs begin in a digital playground of freestyle forms and color. As abstract components emerge on screen, a search for balance and hierarchy drives an iterative process.

Digital ideas are made real with the mechanical execution of cutting, coloring and gluing paper or chipboard material. As a color maximalist my work features striking palettes, bringing energy into the cut-out compositions. Typically featuring overlapping silhouettes, my work aims to acknowledge and highlight those interesting spaces created in between with vibrant colors and material dimension.