An article on artist Kathryn Schultz Norris in yesterday's Today section omitted information about an exhibition of her work in Fells Point. Her paintings are being shown at the Bismark/Wilson Gallery, 1760 Bank St., from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. today and Saturday. Information: 410- 675-8959.

She was working at Facconnable, the upscale men's clothing boutique in Manhattan. He'd come in to buy a tie, always a tie, so he could see her. When she was gone for a few months, out West to see a sick relative, he thought she quit.

One day, he saw her again and bought another tie. He had on a suit jacket, and he took it off to try on a vest. She saw his gun.

What, are you a detective or something?

Yeah, I thought you knew.

She had no idea who he was. The men in the store, in suits and ties, Wall Street types, were not the kind she dated. She was an artist, selling men's suits part-time to make ends meet. She thought, You must be the best-dressed police officer in the city. She asked him, "What's your name?"

"Eddie."

She was about to introduce herself when he spoke again.

"You're Kathryn, I know."

She is now Kathryn Schultz Norris, an artist.

He is Edward T. Norris, a cop.

Not long ago, he was third in command in Manhattan.

She was riding the subway wearing combat boots, black shirt and jeans, sometimes a baseball cap, to her painting studio in the furrier district.

Then he got the top job in Baltimore. She got a bodyguard.

It took a while, with a toddler, a new city, her first real house and a police shadow, but she's back painting, three days a week, in jeans, black shirt and bandanna.

"Be careful," she warns her husband one day when he stops into her Fells Point studio and helps her move a canvas. The painting might be wet, and he's wearing a suit. He's ruined suits before.

He's running behind schedule. There's the usual stuff, bioterrorism, drugs, security for a coming presidential visit. And the media are freaking out over the murder of two kids, he says. She nods, familiar with the morning's news.

"Have I seen this one before?" he asks, pointing to a large canvas.

Often the police commissioner finds his wife reworking a painting he really liked. Stop! Stop! he says. Don't paint over it! What did you do that for? Enough already.

But she won't stop - can't stop - until she gets to clarity.

The underpainting comes through when she paints a canvas over. The process is chaotic. Her canvases are large, 50 by 54, and she prefers to paint them hung from the wall. It's a very physical process, befitting somebody who played basketball for Stanford. There is paint on the floor, on the walls, a tuna can holding up one leg of the table that holds her palette.

There is always a small canvas on her easel at the same time she paints a large one. Moving between them gives her a diversion, a break, that allows her to think about the one left alone until, suddenly, she says, "Oh, that's where it needs to go."

There was a time when she questioned how she worked, when she wondered if the way she made art could be refined. Other artists she knew were more rigid. Day after day, she would look at her work and paint over it. It would take her longer to discover what it was she wanted to say, the meaning.

She doesn't fight it anymore. She has learned to be comfortable, to accept it as her way of solving problems. Only 10 days ago she added a new color to a small painting she thought was done, knowing it might not be dry by today, when her one-woman show opens in Fells Point. It's her coming out.

Her paintings evoke a place or feeling. Some have a checkered appearance, a feeling of texture. Others take form on a background of wide stripes. Somewhere there's a struggle - man-made vs. organic or structure vs. chaos. Her visual awareness was initiated through nature, hiking and camping during her youth in Northern California, where her father was in the lumber business. A just-finished canvas in blues and gray, titled Frolic, seems to move in and out like a dance. She relates it to being athletic.

Her work is subjective, not figurative, and that makes it more challenging than some people want in a painting.

When the police commissioner recently passed out invitations to her show - invitations that featured a detail from a finished painting - one of his staff approached him.

We're coming to the opening and, you know, my wife, she likes this stuff, the man said.

But, on the Q.T., do you?

Ties that bind

Seventy-dollar ties were all a cop could afford in a store where suits sold for $1,200. He asked his friends for money to buy some for them, too. Her friends stepped aside to let her wait on him. "Copper," the salespeople called him. Or, "That Tie Guy."

One day, when she was not at the store, he left her an NYPD raid hat with his business card and a note tucked inside: If you're ever in trouble, give me a call.

"What kind of trouble would I have?" she asked her artist friends. When she called to thank him, he thought she was a prankster set up by his friends. A week later, he invited her to his promotion ceremony. She declined, but she would meet him afterward for dinner.

And, she invited him to accompany her to an exhibit for Willem de Kooning, the foremost abstract expressionist painter, then, in the fall of 1994, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He ran out and bought a bunch of books on abstract art.

Three weeks later, they moved in together.

She showed him her graduate studio at the School of Visual Arts on 21st Street. "This is what I am," she said. His impression of artists was of kids in black, with red hair or Mohawks. She wore designer suits and worked at Fifth Avenue and 54th Street. People who dressed like artists, they were wannabes, she told him. Serious artists, friends whose work showed in New York and California, put their energy into their art.

He didn't fit into her stereotype of cops, either. He was very smart, a thinker.

From walking the streets of New York, checking out the fashions, he developed a sense of color and texture. He appreciated beautiful things, and he was always into clothing; even in uniform, everything had to look good.

He was strongly independent.

She had traveled a year in India, half of it alone. She moved to New York, for her art, without knowing a soul.

She had been married before, to an artist.

He had been married, too, to a cop.

Time passed. One weekend after he had become a deputy commissioner, he painted the walls in his office Oxblood Red, and hung up one of her huge canvases.

Oh, there are those squiggly lines, his friends said.

Or, I think I see Chinese noodles.

People think he just says he likes her paintings. Not true. He tells her when he doesn't like one. He likes most, and some he really likes. Her "shield" painting, a 60 by 62 canvas of nine shields, each a different texture and color, one fake leopard, another dots of red fur, in a quilt-like pattern - it's kinda weird, she says - he wants to keep forever.

The piece, done soon after they were married in 1996, was inspired by his interest in heraldry and family crests, and it hangs in their dining room. The walls throughout the downstairs of their home on a quiet street in Baltimore were recently painted smoky gray, the better to showcase her paintings. He picked the color.

It's their first real house, after apartments in New York and for her, a houseboat in Sausalito, Calif., and a warehouse in Oakland.

Being in the limelight

Until Baltimore, where she accompanies her husband to official functions, she didn't own a dress. She has a few now, she says, laughing. Most are black.

He works in the limelight. In an office he painted Napoleon blue, decorated with the fleur de lis she painted at his request - he collects them - he thinks about how to reduce the city's murder rate.

She works in anonymity. With a ready laugh, a relaxed demeanor and an intense commitment, she paints alone. She likes it that way, and she has no problem separating herself from his work. His job actually helps; she needs to be alone to paint, and he's gone a lot.

Six months ago she started what is now her favorite piece.

She began by pasting tiny squares of paper on the bottom of a large canvas and a few large shards of paper vertically down the middle. It seemed Japanese in feeling to her.

As the anniversary of 9/11 approached, and she continued painting, it occurred to her that the falling squares were window panes and the shards, with her signature squiggly line whirling through them, a black funnel cloud. She hadn't been able to paint when the twin towers fell. Eddie lost friends, and he couldn't attend their funerals in New York; he had responsibilities in Baltimore. She had to be there for him.

Outside the studio in late summer, she felt another kind of tornado swirling: The media were on Eddie's case for spending too much money from a discretionary fund on dinners in New York and gifts for cops. He was upset by this, an attack on his integrity, and took it home. She felt it. When she picked up the painting again, she moved intensely, painted more aggressively, reds and blacks and powerful movements. She painted faster, too, to release her anxieties.

A month passed before she found the right name for the work: Assault.

They are both 42, the artist and the cop. Each sees the world differently from other people, and sometimes they see things other people don't; she is more visual, he is more descriptive. Both must be creative to solve problems.

People don't understand artists, he says. They make fun of them. And they don't have a clue what cops do.

Says Kathryn Norris: "We are both outsiders."

Artists choose it, and cops find out that only other cops can know what they go through.

In New York the last five years, where her work has been shown in small galleries and purchased by big collectors, including Werner Kramarsky, she was known as Kathryn. That is, if anybody wanted to know another artist, there are so many of them.

In Baltimore, people want to call her Kate.

Her husband's position opened doors. She was introduced as a painter in the art community by members of the mayor's committee on the arts and warmly welcomed. But few have seen her work. People may wonder, she knows: Is she a Sunday painter? In the art world, being the commissioner's wife could be a liability.

She says her work speaks for itself. Now it's her turn to stand in the limelight.