Artist Spotlight – Katherine Updegraff White
Katherine Updegraff White has been making art since childhood.
“It was funny, because I didn’t realize how much it was part of my personality until I moved here,” Katherine said. She came back into contact with a woman who had been her babysitter when she was a child. “She said I was easy to take care of because I was always in my bedroom drawing.” The former babysitter is now a patron, Katherine added.
Her father was an encyclopedia of knowledge when it came to natural history, instilling in Katherine a deep love of nature and science that has informed her work throughout her life. He was a natural-born teacher. “Whenever we were out in the woods, he was always teaching and telling me really cool things about nature and the creation, and I just loved it.”
These beginnings took Katherine to the University of Georgia, and from there to the University of Michigan, where she earned her master’s degree in medical illustrations. That combination of art and science comes naturally for Katherine, and she sees them as parts of a bigger whole.
“I occasionally teach a mini-workshop at Centre College for an ecology class,” Katherine said. “They need to keep an almanac of a space on campus for a semester, and a lot of them are STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) students, and don’t have any background in drawing. I tell them if you just learn the basics in drawing, it’s going to make you better at everything else you do.”
Katherine said everything she does as an artist comes from experiences. “I will live with something in my head for months, just working it out. How am I going to get that feeling across? What color is going to do that? How is the composition going to do that?” Her compositions aren’t static, “because that’s what I feel when I’m in nature, that overwhelming sense of design and purposefulness and peace.” That’s something she is trying to convey in her art.
Katherine is from St. Petersburg, Florida, but has lived just about everywhere, from Montana to West Africa. Her husband worked as a doctor in third-world nations and in remote parts of the United States before eventually settling in Kentucky. They have been living on their Lincoln County farm since 2006.
Farming and homeschooling her five children took much of her time for years. When her son Isaac got sick with bone cancer at age 13, they started a three-year battle, which took them to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital regularly. During that time, Katherine found a woman online who was doing a painting a day, and began to follow her journey, watching her improve as the days went by.
“Just before Isaac passed away, she had a five-day painting challenge,” Katherine said. The rules were simple – create a painting each day for five days. You could plan and mix paint as long as you would like, but when you started painting, you had to finish within 20-30 minutes.
She used that challenge to jump-start her painting career. The immediacy forced Katherine to be more fluid and less careful, going against her training as a medical illustrator. That daily painting practice led her to the Art Center.
Life on the farm can be a little isolating, so being able to come into Danville and spend time in her studio here gives her a connection to other artists and the public. She’s taught classes here and has been a studio member since 2017.
Now a grandmother, Katherine reflects on how there are so many different parts of her life, but they’re all of a piece. “I’m a mother, I’m a grandmother, I’m an artist, I’m a teacher, I’m a wife,” she said. But I think if we saw ourselves as more integrated, we would be healthier, because then you would see that ‘this’ isn’t taking away from ‘that’. Like, I may not be doing my art right now, but I am taking care of three grandchildren – and that is a very creative endeavour!”