Acrylic and mixed media on canvas — color relationships built through transparent layers, the garden and the bouquet as occasions for formal argument.
Kathe Fraga paints flowers and gardens, but the subject of her paintings is color. The flowers are occasions — they provide the specific hues she needs to run the color arguments she is interested in — but the argument itself is about what happens when two specific pigments are placed in relation and how that relationship changes when a third is introduced. Her technique uses acrylic's transparency to build these relationships in layers that modify each other.
The warm-cool dynamics in her work are precise: a Beautiful Blue Morning is not atmospherically blue but analytically blue — a specific temperature of blue held against the warm passages of a garden in morning light. The Blush of Roses pushes the warm side of the palette until it approaches discomfort and then holds it there. These are not pretty paintings in the way gallery flower paintings are often pretty. They are color instruments.
Her mixed media works introduce collage elements — printed tissue, textured papers, drawn marks — where the painted surface cannot achieve a particular color quality. The found materials are not decorative additions but technical solutions to specific problems: a color that paint cannot reproduce, a surface texture that brush work cannot achieve.
Fraga has been represented in Pacific Northwest galleries for decades and her work is in extensive private collections in the region and nationally. The consistency of her practice over time is itself the evidence: she is solving the same problem at greater refinement, season after season.
"Every painting is a color theory test. The question is always: what happens when this meets that?"
Fraga is based on Bainbridge Island, where her studio and garden are both working tools — the garden provides the source material, the studio processes it.
Private viewings by appointment · Bainbridge Island · Park City · Ships worldwide