Kate McPhee was born in 1961 in Denver, Colorado, USA, and currently lives and works in an artist loft building in North Adams, Massachusetts. She studied at Columbia University in NYC and holds a BFA in painting from University of Colorado at Boulder and an MFA in visual arts from Bennington College in Vermont.
Growing up in the west included many outdoor excursions and trips to Santa Fe, New Mexico where Kate was exposed to a variety of art. She was greatly influenced by religious art, especially the tradition of retablo paintings– small devotional prayer paintings. Later, living in Vermont, Kate drew on the rural landscape for her inspiration and the folk art style of Grandma Moses and other early primitive painters.
She has never felt comfortable staying locked into a “signature style” or even one medium and has made a range of work from large-scale abstract sculpture to tiny miniature illuminations. To support her life as an artist, she has run a slow clothing company for several years where she designs and fabricates a range of garments made from sustainable natural fibers. Her “Illumination Series” could be seen also as a purely commercial endeavor for at one time over 50 retail outlets carried her handmade Illumination Plaques, yet the impetus for these was closely aligned with her fine art themes and though they had an illustrational style, she was in fact illustrating her own visions and not commercial projects.
Despite wearing many different berets as an artist, Kate always returns to painting as her true love. She works from intuition and memory, alluding to an open narrative based on mood more than specific story or interpretation. She loves color in painting above all else and all her work employs a dramatic use of color and an appreciation for the materiality of the medium of paint.
Her paintings have been collected by numerous private and public collectors across the USA including Children’s Hospital Colorado, The Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art, Kaiser Permanente Boulder and Colorado Springs, and The Boone Family Foundation.
Kate McPhee Studio 