Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is delighted to announce an upcoming exhibition of paintings by Katie DeGroot. “Resplendent” will be on display at the gallery’s 529 West 20th St. location -6W.

DeGroot’s work pays homage to the seemingly arbitrary, but constant, insistent growth of the botanic world. She considers specific trees alone and as part of their various natural groupings. Her meticulous, detailed watercolors portray each tree as an individual - each with its specific structure, stance, and decoration of fungi. She also captures how each tree reacts to the other, equally observed characters in the group. As DeGroot puts it:

When we think of a tree we usually conjure up an image of a perfectly pruned tree, balanced and symmetrical. In nature, those rarely exist. Trees are individuals. Trees grow to survive, adapting to their given environment, growing into strange shapes, producing oddly shaped limbs, becoming contortionists to get to sunlight, and bowing to the will of other larger neighboring trees. They grow in context with each other and in relationships with their neighbors, adapting as best they can to the situation they find themselves in. In many ways they are similar to us, part of a larger community, whose varied geography and specific environments challenge and form us as individuals.

DeGroot’s masterful, intricate brushwork emphasizes the individuality of each branch. When viewed as a whole, however, each painting vibrates with an unexpected use of intense color expresses the eternal interconnectedness of the natural world.

Katie DeGroot, born in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1955, works and lives in upstate New York. She earned her B.A. from New York University in 1977. and has exhibited extensively in the Hudson Valley. She has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Gris in Hudson, New York, and Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York City. Her work is in the collections of Agnes Gund, the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, the State University of New York, and Fidelity Investments.