Kathrine Lemke Waste
Kathrine Lemke Waste explores the artifacts of modern culture with a pop art sensibility, grounded in her Northern California roots. Her paintings celebrate color, form and light as she finds beauty in common, ordinary objects. “Waste’s visually poetic images have often been described as ‘luminous.’ Her works are distinctive in the way they capture light and reflections,” writes Bonnie Gangelhoff of her work in Southwest Art Magazine. “Simple, ordinary objects like a kitchen toaster are transformed into beautiful shiny objects through her imaginative eye.” Kathrine’s paintings and writings about the agricultural riches of the region were a regular feature for the Sacramento Bee in her popular weekly visual column, “One Perfect Thing.” She’s been highlighted in several issues of Southwest Art Magazine, American Art Collector Magazine and her work was featured in the Sunset Magazine’s Arizona Idea House. Kathrine’s painting, “Satsuma Mandarins” was selected by California Senate President pro Tem, Darrel Steinberg to hang in the California State Senate’s 8th Annual California Contemporary Art Collection.
Waste studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1980s, as well as what she describes as a “five-year apprenticeship” with Salvatore Casa, winner of the American Watercolor Society’s Gold Medal. She has taken workshops with Charles Reid, Nicholas Simmons, Guy Diehl and Stephen Kaltenbach. Kathrine teaches watercolor workshops for the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and throughout the Northern California region. Her teaching background extends to academe, where she spent 15 years teaching in the California’s state college and university system including UC San Diego, Palomar Community College and California State University, Chico.
Currently, she brings the art of painting into the workplace through creativity and innovation workshops, recently completing a two-
month project for Intel. Kathrine is a Master Signature Member of American Women Artists and serves as President on the AWA Board of Directors. It is the essential function of her painting to get the viewer to, as Wordsworth put it, “see into the life of things.”
In a world that bombards us with thousands of visual messages each day, the enduring challenge for me as an artist is to get the viewer to use an eye made quiet, to hold a particular moment in time as transaction among artist, subject and audience.
As Georgia O’Keeffe noted, “objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense.” While the subject matter she paints is best described as contemporary realism – pattern, light, color, form and surface are the most important elements to her in the process of making a painting.
