Kathe Fraga

Chinoiserie · Mixed Media · Bainbridge Island, WA

Lacquerware · Acrylic · Found Objects

Available at JG Art Gallery + Events™

JG Art Gallery + Events™ · Bainbridge Island, WA · Park City, UT · jgartgallery.com

The Painter

Kathe Fraga trained first as a writer — Université Grenoble, then the University of Washington — and worked in advertising in Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Seattle before returning to painting on Bainbridge Island, where she has lived for more than twenty years. The transition was not abrupt. Her earlier work with language, particularly her instinct for how surface and story accumulate meaning, runs directly through the paintings she makes now.

The work is built on a technique rooted in 17th and 18th century lacquerware: acrylic applied to frescoed canvas or panel, then sealed with lacquer. The result holds light differently than a conventional painting — the surface has depth the way a varnished piece of antique furniture does, a depth that makes the painted birds and botanicals read as embedded rather than applied. She layers the panels with Chinoiserie motifs, vintage French wallpaper patterns, and botanical elements gathered from the forests and garden of the 110-year-old beach-rock house she and her husband have lived in for two decades.

"Worn surfaces and distressed textures combine to create something soft and familiar — but then I add a bold swath of color. It is a welcome disturbance." — Kathe Fraga

The Work

In Roses Are Red — the largest work currently at JG at Inquire — a deep burgundy ground is broken by white blossoms painted in near-silhouette, the petals separated and precise against the dark field. The composition reads as pattern first, then, as the eye adjusts, as individual flowers. That oscillation — between decoration and close observation — is the territory Fraga has made her own.

Paris Court (Triptych) works across three panels, the lacquered surface producing a horizontal continuity that holds the botanical motifs in suspension. The triptych format resists easy reading: you are always aware of the seams, always being asked to hold three distinct planes as one image. It is a more demanding structure than Fraga's single-panel works, and the lacquered surface — with its even, reflective finish — rewards that difficulty.

Her work has been published in VIE Magazine, Better Homes & Gardens, Seattle Magazine, Luxe Interiors + Design, and international design press in Turkey, Mexico, and Malaysia. In 2017 she was commissioned by Cle de Peau Beauté (Shiseido) to create the imagery for their limited-edition Nuit de Chine holiday collection. Her paintings have appeared in Bainbridge Island Museum of Art and in institutional collections including Swedish Hospital and Island Hospital. She appeared in the Netflix production The Kominsky Method.

Medium

Lacquerware with Hand-Painted Decoration
Mixed Media on Panel / Canvas
Acrylic & Found Objects
Oil on Canvas

Studio

Bainbridge Island, WA
Resident 20+ years

Press

VIE Magazine · Better Homes & Gardens
Seattle Magazine · Luxe Interiors + Design
Maison Française · Casas & Mas

Collections & Commissions

BIMA (Bainbridge Island Museum of Art)
Swedish Hospital · Island Hospital
Cle de Peau Beauté / Shiseido (2017)
The Kominsky Method (Netflix)