Katherine Filice is an award-winning American abstract artist based in Northern California. Her work is known for its exploration of environmental topics, particularly the forest. She uses linear mark-making to capture the energy, memories, and stories that vibrate through the ancient trees.
Filice's artistic development has been shaped by a blend of traditional art education and invaluable guidance from artists, critics, and educators including Michael David, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Paul D'Agostino, and Judy Glantzman. She has also garnered over 100 design awards for her commercial work. In addition, Filice holds a BS degree from the University of San Francisco. Her extensive education and professional experience have greatly influenced her exploration of human relationships and their reflection within our environment.
Filice's paintings and drawings are held in private and corporate collections worldwide. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Her most recent solo exhibitions include "Lost in the Woods" at the Pacific Art League in California and "The Secret Language of the Forest" at Gallery 1202 in California.
Artist Statement: Working with both ink and oil, paper and canvas, I am a painter with an affinity for abstracting forestal forms, experiences and sensations with a particular devotion to line. Linear mark-making allows me to chart a navigational route around surfaces, and to convey a sense of losing and finding my way – like leaving traces for tracking back to feelings, things and places.
I am deeply inspired by the environment, and by its shifting modes and moments of stillness. I especially enjoy observing and absorbing all of this while taking long walks through the Northern California woods, my focus of research and meditation alike. I am captivated by the intertwined linearities of leaves, branches, trunks, bark, bramble, tangle and brush, and by the intricately laced patterns of beetle trails on fallen trees, boughs and stumps. For me, they’re like the forest’s manner of writing, much like the wind rustling through the trees’ canopies as its whispery way of sharing secrets and telling stories. In my art, I translate this language into organically suggestive lines reflective of ramifications, rhizomes and shoots.
My work is a journaling of time, and a reckoning with that which is human and that which is not. We are as caught up in time and nature as we are likely to lose ourselves within them, but this also suggests that we might relocate ourselves, somewhere, if we try – in marks we make and scars we leave, as well as in blossoming petals, atmospheric voices and seasonal rings. In all such things, memory persists: footprints, fumes, flashbacks and wisps, and these indications might be elusive or striking, gentle or harsh. We recollect quietness, melancholy, joy and hope, and our sensory reactions to the same, in a journey towards grace. We were here before we were lost. I carve a path by tracking ways through my art.
