Kate Thayer | Paintings
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Q&A with Kate
1. What is your chosen medium?
My paintings began with pastel. While trying to obtain texture with products and technique my work evolved into oils. Now each painting is done with palette knives and thick paint to create textures and marks.
2. How did you start your career in art?
Later in life my goal was to create something of my own. Art was that way to express myself. Colors and textures have been part of all the times in my life. Knitting, flower arranging, herb gardening and cooking all contained colors and textures. These were a special part of my past. They all become interwoven into my paintings.
3. What informs your art?
The landscape in all the seasons and times of day is what fuels my work.
Nature with its changing colors that create different moods is so captivating. It is all about the colors, smells, movement and spirit within the forests of Western North Carolina.
Being in the moment, mixing paint, making colors, then creating marks and textures connects me with that remembered place.
4. What jobs you have worked other than as a professional artist?
Regular jobs were not part of my past. Just a little of this and that.
5. What questions do you ask yourself when starting to work?
My work is based upon photos of places that touched me. These bring back the emotional connection with the scene. Then the task is to convey the spirit of that special place.
6. Do you have a quote that’s important to you displayed in your studio? If so, what is it?
“I can't work completely out of my imagination. I must put my foot in a bit of truth, and then I can fly free.” Andrew Wyeth
7. Which artist (living or not) would you most like to invite for dinner? What would you serve?
Vincent Van Gogh because of his love of color and texture and determination to create his version. We would have wine and lots of raw vegetables in a marvelous array of colors, textures, smells, and tastes.
8. What has been your most unusual request for your art?
To paint from a photograph. My work can not be done from another person's photo because I have no connection with that place.
9. What music are you listening to these days?
My studio is a quiet place where I talk to myself about the painting on the easel. Other times my music is “The Little Phat Band” by Gordon Goodwin or other beat driven music that I respond to in my way of dancing.
10. What is on your nightstand?
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. It is about how the ancient knowledge of indigenous people can be combined with the science of nature. She creates images of the beauty of the forests.
“The sacred places in nature are fast disappearing. I want to preserve their beauty, their meaning in my paintings, in order to share them with anyone who looks upon them.”
About Kate Thayer
There is nothing more challenging as a painter of nature than to capture her moods, her forms and colors, and to translate what I see and feel into a painting. I relish the ever changing real thing.
I try to capture nature’s ways. Her beauty, power, mysteries, and all the nuances there in. Painting the landscape connects me to the vitality of nature and enriches my soul. It is my way of preserving the places that called to me to be painted as I see them.
My aim is to bring to the viewer the special places that have touched my heart. My task is to portray how they speak to me without words. The vitality and energy within the forest is life giving. I want to bring to life what adds to life.