Artist Spotlight: Katherine Fraser
The art of sacrifice
‘Manifest,’ by Katherine Fraser, 2011, oil on canvas, 58” x 62”
EXCERPT //
“The ‘kids question’ is answered,” says painter Katherine Fraser. “But now, I’m sort of evaluating.”
Fraser spent a long time wanting and picturing kids in her life, and exploring the theme in works such as the moody “Manifest,” in which a woman with a baby strapped to her back consults a map to chart her course.
“I’m in my early 40s. I’ve seen women take every different solution to this problem,” she says.
Fraser’s answer to “the kids question” is that continuing life as an artist is a better choice for her than having a child. She says that while deciding not to become a mother made her feel rudderless for a while, she’s now finding her way by asking questions she knows only she can answer as she navigates to this new place in her mind.
“What’s the rest of my life going to look like, financially?” she asks aloud. “You know, what sacrifices do I need to make in order to continue having a life as an artist and feel like my future is stable? There’s constant reevaluation of the level of sacrifice that you’re making. To be an artist, you’re sacrificing a lot—a level of comfort in life. It’s always a balancing act and a reevaluation of what your priorities are.”
In her newer oil-on-canvas pieces, which she has been working on over the pandemic, she often depicts her own creativity in the form of a cat. She describes it as “this beautiful, generous, ephemeral thing that comes to me—if I let it—but I can’t force it to come.” In others that she’s working on now, she’s depicting post-party scenes of ruin, a stand-in for “how screwed up our world is.” // HSB
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