Katie captured life boldly and beautifully. Her love for nature, her family, and her friends shines brilliantly in her artwork. Bold colors defined her style, along with a distinctive line and fun subject matter. Her favorite subjects included flowers (making up more than 50% of her
oeuvre
), animals, birds, food, and her loved ones. I hope that my proximity to Katie can provide valuable insight into her artistic practice, process, and vision.
Katie mainly worked with markers on paper, embracing both media to their fullest. She exploited the streaked artifact of marker to convey movement, texture, and variation. Contours of receding objects pass through the foreground, emphasizing objects’ presence and shape no matter their relative positions. As in Cubism, Katie depicted objects from varying points of view simultaneously. She appreciated the controlled line she could produce with markers. Katie cut and manipulated the paper on which she drew. Her work,
Dolphin
, depicts a dolphin jumping out of the water and the traditional rectangular page. 
In other works, she glued cut-out, stamped birds and butterflies onto the flowers she drew, seeming to land on the flower to drink up some nectar. Katie often combined the written word with her images, as well. Katie was ambidextrous, and even colored with both hands simultaneously. Her distinctive handwriting mixes uppercase and lowercase.
Katie worked
on large wooden drawing boards laid flat on the ground. She wrote her name, her loved ones’ names, and messages to herself on these boards. She stored her materials in caddies, meticulously sorted by color. If a marker ran dry, she picked another from the same color category, no matter the exact hue. This method resulted in large patches of subtly varied colors, enhanced by her iconic marker application. This interplay of hues within color-categories defines many of her iconic works. To ink large areas of color, Katie divided the paper into sections. Then, she would fill individual sections with ink streaking in a single direction. Adjacent sections streak in different directions, resulting in a dynamic patchwork of streaks. Katie’s artworks in solid colors lose their life.
In addition to markers, Katie explored graphite, pastel, paint, sculpture, and photography. She drew from life; her photography; magazines and books; from photos on the Internet; and her imagination. Never short of inspiration, Katie often produced several drawings successively—especially during afternoon art classes at the Donovan Art Studio. Her personal style arose from her pure soul, observant eye, and unique perspective on the world. Artists strive for authenticity, and I can think of no other artist whose work so fully reflects their life. In just 26 years, Katie produced more than 1,300 works of art.* Please enjoy the complete works by clicking on the drop-down categories under the “Artwork” tab above.
JD
*All works are faithful to Katie’s original vision. No works are altered. Idiosyncratic spellings, marker streaks, and cut corners are preserved in the following images. Some works have sustained damage, which is preserved in the following images.
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