E. E. Kono is a painter based in Los Angeles and Dubuque, Iowa. A descendant of frontier settlers, raised in Iowa's Driftless Region, she works in egg tempera — an ancient medium requiring extraordinary patience and precision — to examine what lies beneath the familiar stories of American mythology: the layered histories of place, the cultural legacies of Manifest Destiny, and the quieter, often suppressed truths embedded in landscape.Kono studied art history at the University of Iowa and the University of Hull, England, and learned traditional egg tempera technique under the guidance of artist Koo Schadler. Her materials are inseparable from her subjects. She works with silverpoint and natural pigments gathered from historically significant sites — earth that has been walked over, fought over, mythologized — and returns it to the surface of the painting as both medium and meaning.Her work has been exhibited at Bergdorf Goodman and Future Fair in New York, the Riverside Art Museum in California, the Dubuque Museum of Art, La Luz de Jesus in Los Angeles, and in an upcoming solo exhibition at Troutbeck in Amenia, New York, curated by the Wassaic Project. Her paintings have appeared in Juxtapoz, American Art Collector, and Beautiful Bizarre Magazine. She is also an award-winning author and illustrator whose book illustrations are held in the collection of the Mazza Museum.As critic Shana Nys Dambrot has written, each painting by Kono contains a whole world — a chapel-like but pagan-leaning miniature universe in which symbol, myth, and material carry equal weight. In her own words: "I'm interested in how stories and symbols transcend culture and time, and how specifically chosen materials can connect those stories to place."