“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.” – Georgia O’Keeffe

The tenacity, vigour and beauty of nature has been motivating Katherine Throne’s practice for many years. The energy the artist feels within a wild garden she translates into large gestural marks and thick layers of impasto oil paint.

Katherine manipulates paint in a way that mimics light refracting in nature, transporting the viewer into another world. We feel the lavishness of petals, the friction of stems, and the deepness of long shadows. One cannot help but be drawn into each scene; to be touched by the resonating energy of the flora and fauna in her works.

Katherine’s most recent paintings, from the exhibition Verdant, were created while establishing her own garden in Otago. As the tangible garden grew alongside the pictorial, the boundaries between each blurred into one creation. At the heart of both was the artist’s desire to acknowledge the raw beauty and the tenacious spirit of the flower.

“Gardens have a hold on me. Especially the wild ones where nature rambles in delightful disorder. For years I’ve voyeuristically lived in other people’s gardens, taking fragments of that exuberance home and then translating it into my language of paint. Finally, last summer, I planted my own garden.”
Courtesy of Sanderson Contemporary