Katharine White received a B.A. in English literature from Connecticut College and an M.F.A. in painting from the Yale School of Art.

She has exhibited her paintings, drawings, and collages in galleries and museums in Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts and Louisiana. Her work has also been included in exhibitions at the London Institute Gallery in England and the Espace-Saint-Benezet in Avignon, France. She has received grants and awards both for her own work and for her efforts in promoting the visual arts. Her work is included in numerous corporate and private collections throughout the United States.

The artist recently moved from New Orleans. She currently lives and works on an island off the coast of Maine.

I am a landscape painter. The urban landscape was my focus for twenty-five years while I lived in New Haven and New Orleans. I was interested in the surprising juxtapositions of architectural geometry and nature found in cities; and by the way light and shadow, time and weather transform the seemingly commonplace.

In 1994, I moved from New Haven, a city whose design and spirit are influenced by academic rigor and cool, ordered New England logic, to New Orleans: humid, sensuous, disorderly, surrounded by water and vast skies, and defined by the rhythms of its music and the Mississippi River.

As different as New Haven and New Orleans are, I used the same methods to find my subject matter in each place. Working slowly, spending weeks observing and gathering information, I made numerous on-site pencil, watercolor and pastel sketches (often using a grid for scale) accompanied by detailed written descriptions. I saved colored papers, printed material, and detritus found on the streets or in my studio.

Selecting from this inventory, I assembled collages - compositions of chance associations, forms, and colors conjuring a specific place and time. Finally, referring to information from the sketches and collages, I created paintings that are a combination of direct observation, memory and imagination.

For three years, thanks to the generosity of a friend, I had the unique opportunity to work day and night from a balcony seven floors above the Mississippi River where it flowed through the heart of downtown New Orleans. The air was filled with moisture and the hum of passing tugs, barges and tankers. The sights were dazzling.

As I struggled to capture the luminous, rapidly changing light, billowing clouds, the convergence of water, land and sky, and the unsettling combination of beauty and danger -- the undercurrents and riptides -- of this beguiling city, I started experimenting with new materials and techniques: liquid acrylics, shellac inks, and encaustic. Edges softened and began to dissolve.

On August 6, 2005, work from my "Currents, Eddies, and Light" and "Conjure" series were part of the opening exhibition at Gallery Bienvenu. Three weeks later, Hurricane Katrina and the catastrophic failure of the levee system shattered the structural and emotional landscape of New Orleans. I returned to New Orleans a month after the storm. But after eight months of living full time in a climate of physical and psychological uncertainty, my husband and I decided to return to the Northeast.

I now live on a small island off the coast of Maine. Not urban - but a uniquely unspoiled, intensely beautiful place. In my studio, overlooking a tidal ocean pond, I am using the same methods to explore this new landscape. As I work, I continue refining and simplifying - moving my art closer to the edge of abstraction without abandoning the specificity of place.