Bio

Katie grew up on Popcorn Acres, a former dairy farm outside Boulder, Colorado, named by her mother because "something was always popping up" — five kids, a parade of pets, endless crafts, friends, and a fair share of lively chaos. The expansive natural landscape, paired with this ever-changing family environment, became a wellspring for Katie’s imagination and artistic development.

In the late 1990s, she undertook intensive mentorships with established painters, cultivating a rigorous foundation in traditional techniques and creative inquiry. By 2000, her work was being exhibited in venues throughout Colorado.

In 2005, Katie relocated to Seattle, Washington, where her practice continued to evolve in both method and vision. Over the past 15 years, her paintings have been presented in annual solo exhibitions and featured in galleries across the Pacific Northwest and Southwest. Her work is held in numerous private collections internationally, reflecting a steadily growing presence and resonance within the contemporary art world.

Statements

Cityscapes in Motion: An Ongoing Exploration

The urban environment has always captivated me, igniting a profound sense of wonder and restless curiosity. Every anonymous cityscape I paint hums with countless unfolding stories, layered across streets, windows, and unseen corners, all moving at once as I pass through. The city’s ceaseless energy — its tension between chaos and order — offers endless challenges and unexpected revelations, fueling my ongoing exploration and vision.

I am drawn to studying cities from shifting angles, striving to distill the fleeting spirit of place through my work. By manipulating perspective, exaggerating details, or stripping forms down to their essence, I seek to translate the restless life of urban spaces. Across a range of methods, my evolving voice threads through, a constant amid the changing lines and textures.

In my Seattle studio, I quietly tend the roots of my creative practice — roots deeply shaped by my years of interpreting the urban landscape. As I explore other subjects and directions, the sensibilities honed through painting cities — a sensitivity to movement, structure, and layered narratives — continue to inform everything I create. Each new piece, whatever its subject, carries forward the evolving dialogue between observation, memory, and imagination that first took hold in the city’s endless energy.

Material Worlds: Sentient Beings

When I look into an open closet, I see more than clothing—I see a material world of color, pattern, and barely contained chaos. A clothing-scape of disguises. These are not merely clothes, but traces of lives in pause—fragments of identity, desire, and forgetting. A tangle of stories and truths. Closets have always intrigued me, but now they captivate me. I find myself drawn into their small, secret worlds—examining the human shells that hang silently, the untold stories, the hidden stashes of self. In these crowded corners where garments gather, where clutter lounges or hides, I sense the dreams and hopes, regrets and promises of lives waiting, longing to be seen.

Crowds 2020

This series was created during the 2020 pandemic—a time when public gatherings were restricted and cities across the country were alive with protest. I chose to paint scenes of crowds at various events, exploring the contrast between the sudden isolation we faced and the once-unquestioned act of gathering. These works serve as a visual reflection, capturing the energy and emotion of people coming together—something that felt so ordinary until the pandemic changed everything.