Featured Artist Kate Kern Mundie

Painter Kate Kern Mundie uses rich color and instills a sense of place in her stunning portfolio of landscapes. Visit her website to see more of her portfolio.

 

 

My my desire to be an artist can be traced back to age five or six. I was perched on a stool in the studio of a painter friend of my parents while he and my father talked about his work. I took in the long tables, the paint and brushes, and the large freshly stretched canvases leaning against the wall.

 

 

We had neighbors who were artists, too—one taught me silkscreen printmaking, another showed me how to paint with gouache. As a teenager, I would walk around noticing buildings, trees, or the way light fell across the street and think, I want to draw this. I want to paint this. The seeds of a landscape painter were there.

 

 

I studied printmaking at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a medium that gave me the structure and discipline I needed at the time. Drawing was always at the core—essential to printmaking, but also to painting.

 

 

After college, without access to a print shop, I shifted into landscape painting, especially plein air. A residency on Cape Cod in my twenties launched me into painting directly from observation. I’ve continued to learn through peers, mentors, and my own explorations.

 

 

My real driving interest, though, is color. I love how a shift in palette can make you see something familiar in an entirely new way. I experiment constantly, researching historical palettes, reading about what pigments were available to painters of the past. Those discoveries are translated into my own mixtures today.

 

 

Most of my paintings come from the two places where I spend the majority of my time: Philadelphia, with its bridges, industrial edges, and historic neighborhoods, and Deer Isle, Maine, with its tidal waters, rocky coastline, and shifting fog. Both places have shaped my work, and I move between them each year.

 

 

I work in oil, gouache, and watercolor, often on paper or small panels so I can keep my hand loose and responsive to light.

 

 

I regularly exhibit my paintings at F.A.N. Gallery in Philadelphia, Station Gallery in Greenville, Delaware, and Carver Hill Gallery in Camden, Maine.

 

Kate Kern Mundie invites you to follow on Instagram and Substack.

 

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