A Conversation with Katherine Bazak by Sharmon Hilfinger

Katherine and I were introduced to each other by a mutual friend over 30 years ago, when we were both establishing our creative careers while starting our families. Kindred spirits working in different métiers, we have shared our experiences as creative artists ever since. Her exquisite painting of Lucy Drawing graces our dining room and never fails to draw comments from people who see it for the first time.

Sitting down now, so many years later, to talk to Katherine about her career as a figurative painter and teacher has been a fantastic lesson in how to look at art. Talking with Katherine is like going on a tour of the painter’s process, exposing how the materials, color and composition reveal the artistic intent. She reminds us that great artwork is not accidental; it is deeply understood and performed by its creator.  Katherine is exceptionally articulate with her paintbrush as well as with her ruminations on art and how it works.

Sharmon: You and I grew up in the 1960’s and 70’s when the art trends were Conceptual Art, Minimalism, Pop Art, Psychedelic Art. But you have always been a figurative painter—a very fine one, I might add—so I am curious to know what influences and training led you to your personal style of painting.

Katherine: My visual education started at an early age. On Sundays, my father would leave my brother and me on the steps of the National Gallery in Washington DC at 9:45 a.m. before he would go to the golf course about 15 minutes away. We sat on the steps until the Gallery opened—nobody was worried about us, there were guards who knew us. This started when I was 10 years old. I wandered around the museum while my brother sat in rooms that had paintings of boats and read a book.  

One of the first paintings I loved was by Mary Cassatt, a girl with a braid in a white outfit, and another Cassatt of a little girl in a blue chair. Another favorite was by John Singer Sargent called Repose. I spent a lot of time in the room with the Vermeer’s. I remember the painting of a woman with a beautiful jewel-like red hat. 

I loved the Titian room! The Portrait of Farnese with the pink vest, Venus Holding an Apple, Venus and Adonis, the Portrait of the Doge—those paintings have been with me my whole life. There is something going on in those paintings—something behind the eyes of the people he painted.  I could just look at those and know that the painting of Titian’s Doge was better than the other Doges in the room.  

At that age I had no idea who these painters were! But by the time I left high school I had walked through every room at the National Gallery. For a visual person this was heaven.

Every once in a while, we would go to the Phillips Gallery that has a big pre-and-post Impressionist collection. That’s where I saw Renoir’s Boating Party. Some hear the name Renoir and think of peachy-pink people. I mean old ladies love Renoir. In the Boating Party—they’ll say, “he painted the light” which is a cheesy thing to say, but he did! When you see the Boating Party you can feel the wind, you can feel the sunlight. It’s a very evocative painting. It took me a long time to understand and respect this aspect of representational painting.  

There are paintings that I just want to stand in front of and spend time looking at or revisit. Why do certain paintings interest me?  I’ve thought about that a lot and now looking back, I realize that I have always been a ruminator. I love the way some paintings offer me a way to ruminate.  All my paintings have something to do with that. 

Sharmon: What a fantastic introduction to the art world! You became a painter (I gather that your brother did not)—do you remember how that started? Did someone recognize that you had a talent for drawing? 

Katherine: I was not a talented child. Nobody said, “Oh, you have a talent for drawing,” but I liked looking. My earliest memory at five years old is when I pushed a kid out of the way so I could get a dried-up set of paints out of a trash can. I remember bringing them home to my Mom and she said, “Katherine, they’re all dried up!” Why had I brought home something from a trash can? I probably just liked the look of all those circles of color! I just said, “Where’s some paper?” I couldn’t wait to use them.

Sharmon: Were you encouraged, did you take classes outside of school?

Katherine: I did take art lessons, starting in sixth grade. A friend and I took lessons together from a man in our neighborhood and later, I took classes at an art store in Arlington. Mr. Hill was the teacher there and I still remember the moment that I saw how painting was magical. He set up a still-life for us to paint. It had a box with a little gold knocker and I couldn’t paint that knocker because it was reflective. I saw it, but I couldn’t paint it. He came over and painted it for me. All he did was make three strokes: a little bit of Naples yellow and a little bit of white and a little black next to each other and the thing looked like it was metallic! Oh my god, that was magic—he didn’t blend it, he didn’t do anything unusual, he just put these three colors together. All the magic of painting had been revealed! That was my first epiphany!

While I was in high school, I took painting classes at the Corcoran Gallery. It was a fun experience because it was an art school and there were very arty people hanging around. They had a night Life Drawing class with nude models and you were supposed to be 18 to take the class. I was 16 but they let me in, no one really cared. That was the first time I had seen a nude model. To draw that, it felt like “that can’t  be done!” I have some very embarrassing drawings from that time! 

Sharmon: So, by the time you went to college, you knew you wanted to focus on art.  Where did you go to school?

Katherine: My first year, I was at Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia. It was the women’s college for the University of Virginia. At that time (1968) it was less progressive than my high school! PE was English style horseback riding. We had class blazers and had to dress up for Sunday dinner. I had to take some very difficult classes: chemistry, math, French literature (in French), English and World History. I could only take one elective, so I took the only art class offered that semester, sculpture. My parents expected me to be a school teacher. I was there for exactly two months, and I said, “I’ve gotta get out of here!”  

We had looked at a lot of colleges and I knew that Richmond Professional Institute (shortly to become Virginia Commonwealth University) had a Commercial Art program. So, I stayed at school and spent the entire Thanksgiving break creating a portfolio which I submitted to RPI.  In April, I got a letter saying I had been accepted. When I told my parents I had applied—they cried! I convinced them to go visit the school with me. First of all, Richmond, Virginia was a very rugged city especially where I would be living and my father kept saying, “this is not good, not safe!” We had a meeting with the head of the department and my father asked the classic question: “How is she going to make a living?” and the professor said, “Art is for the soul.”

Sharmon: So, you transferred to Virginia Commonwealth University for your second year.

Katherine: Yes. They had hired a whole new group of teachers to start this new University art program. This is a painting that I did. 

Sharmon: It doesn’t look like your paintings at all! 

Katherine: Most of the new teachers were young, they were all men, barely older than the students. I took a painting class where the teacher came in and said “Paint” and left!  This is not to say I didn’t have some amazing teachers, but they were mostly from the Art History department. Richard Carlyon taught contemporary art history, enthralling us with personal anecdotes about John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Andy Warhol. He danced across the room as he lectured about the relationship between dance and painting, introduced us to new forms of art like video and performance art. Dr. Sharon Gallager, who made Medieval art come alive, made me look at Chartres Cathedral in a whole different way. But as far as technique went, I  learned mostly from my fellow students and going to museums and galleries. 

It wasn’t until my sophomore year when I took a night painting class from Dr. Schwartz that I began to have my own ideas about what to paint. Dr. Schwartz was an older teacher, an outsider in this group of new teachers. He taught me how to stretch a canvas, he taught me about composition and basic paint techniques. We talked a lot about paintings, historical and contemporary ones, and he introduced me to different theories about the study of art. He appreciated my love of art and knowledge of art history.   

Sharmon: Because of all those Sundays at the National Gallery!

Katherine: I had two good friends who were also in the Painting & Printmaking program, Alice and Blair. Alice was amazingly talented; her hand and eye could move at the same rate. She became a well known botanical illustrator for the Smithsonian. She was so fun, so crazy, so creative. Blair was a photography student with a very sly sense of humor. The program was not favorable towards women. We had no female teachers. It felt like sometimes even though we were there, the professors didn’t see us. Maybe they just assumed we were irrelevant.  

I remember the three of us taking an art class class where we were not among the professor’s favored students. Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were kings, stain paintings and hard edge paintings were all the rage.  We knew what that teacher wanted (not what we were doing!), so for the final, we got together and formed an assembly line and we put together three portfolios, all of us painting, drawing and collaging one part. We did it all in one night. We all got A’s. I am pretty sure the professor never knew or cared that we did it!

Sharmon: That was learning in spite of the teachers!

Katherine: Yes, we did learn a lot, just not the traditional techniques, but we learned to take control of our lives as artists. We struggled to come up with content that mattered to us. No one was telling us what to do. Our exploration did not end when class was over. We would hitch-hike from Richmond, Virginia to New York City every couple of months to see the current trends. It was a crazy time—pop art and minimalism were popular at the same time, huge installations like Christo’s Valley Curtain, Dan Flavin light sculptures, Nam jun Park videos, Rothko color field paintings and photo realism were all being hailed as “new” art!

Richmond was itself multi-faceted, multi racial, it was historical and quirky especially around the University and the art dept. There were gay students, transgender students, cross-dressers, the LGBTQ of that era, as well as Black, Asian and Hispanic students around campus and in my classes. Very different from Mary Washington and even my high school which was all white. It was the late 60’s and the Civil Rights Movement, the Viet Nam war, the sexual revolution were all playing out around us. There were parties, drugs and LSD. There was one guy who  made a movie, which I think was called Angel Thighs. It was based on Dante’s Devine comedy of Dante being led by Virgil through the nine circles of hell. For the gluttony scene we boiled spaghetti for days, and filled a room waist high with it,  then we poured on the tomato sauce. He filmed it while nude people wallowed in the mix! This was the milieu—there were no teachers involved in this stuff—we were livin’ the life!

Sharmon: Were you painting, doing your own work, outside of assignments for class?

Katherine: I had been looking at figurative paintings shows in New York: Edward Hopper, Alfred Leslie, Philip Pearlstein, Alice Neel, Kitaij, Balthus. The figurative theme became bigger in my mind. My first successful painting was Figure With A Bicycle. I took a photo of myself lying on the floor in my apartment and I painted it. When Dr. Schwartz saw this painting, he told me it was a “break through” work  for me—the painting, the composition, he liked it, but I also liked it. It felt more natural for me. I started doing paintings of my friends. I did a whole series of them. I wasn’t bad at drawing, I could get what I wanted drawn on the canvas and I had black and white photos, developed in my photography class, that I could work from. Though my compositions were influenced by the personality and environment of the person I was painting, they were filtered through  my viewpoint. I didn’t completely understand the potential of my choices, but I knew wen I had something I wanted to paint. I was excited!

It was my last year at VCU. I had no plans. I had a boyfriend and he planned to apply to grad schools. We broke up, but I had the grad school applications. Dr. Schwartz said, “Katherine, don’t give those applications back to him, you apply.” 

I applied and on the strength of my the figurative paintings, I got in everywhere! I chose the University of Wisconsin. They gave me a full scholarship and a studio.  It was great. Madison was an incredible place in a beautiful location, very different from VCU and the city of Richmond. But it was still all men in the painting department! I was given a  major professor, a figurative painter but he was going through a crisis of his own, and he didn’t show up very often. I learned, once again, from museums and the people around me. I also took a lot of art history classes. I started to seek out ways to learn techniques. I took a Craft of the Old Masters class in the Art History Department, read books on techniques, and color theory. I also learned a lot as a Teaching Assistant for drawing classes. In 1972 I received my MFA. 

I, like thousands of other MFAs, began looking for a University teaching job while I worked at my internship…waitressing! I sent out 61 applications, which wasn’t cheap since there was no internet and you had to send out slides with each application. I received 60 rejections, which was hard!  But on the 61st I got an interview for a position at San Diego State University.  It went well and they hired me.

Sharmon: You had earned your MFA and you got a good teaching job, important steps in any career. Did you feel, at that point, that you had developed your painting technique and defined your personal style?

Katherine: As I was to learn, teaching a subject became a great way to learn! California was whole new world to me. I arrived with no car, and not much teaching experience; it was trial by fire!  I taught three classes—beginning drawing, beginning painting and design. The faculty were so supportive. I probably learned as much from the students as they did from me.  There was also a fellow MFA from Wisconsin, Cynthia Osborne, teaching printmaking and we spent time exploring the art world between San Diego and Los Angeles. I was also painting, trying to get a body of work for showing.  My apartment became my studio and the days were so full, I barely had time to sleep!

The following year I married Jay Dohner a chemical engineer whom I had met at Wisconsin and we moved to the SF Bay Area. We converted our garage into a painting studio and I began an intense 14 year period of part time and full time teaching, painting and mounting shows. This was all in the Bay Area. First at Gallery House, a co-op, then small galleries in Palo Alto, group shows at cultural centers and universities. I had success selling my work and getting reviews. Most of my subjects were friends or models from the Palo Alto Models Guild. I bought a flexible (interior wire) mannequin (size 8) from a fashion display company which I used when I didn’t have a live model. 

When I did the Figure with Bicycle, I only knew the fundamentals of painting, “fat” paint over “lean” paint. Experience was my main teacher, learning by doing, however this method can be a little like reinventing the wheel. I brushed paint on a canvas but knew little of the potential of the brush stroke or system of layering color. I was caught up in the subject matter, for which I was getting positive feedback. There was no one I could  talk to about a higher level of technique. At that time, I had no real understanding of the human body. My teachers would just put the model up and say “draw.” I didn’t want to carry on that tradition. I set about a self directed study of anatomy and started a weekly life drawing group in my studio that continued for 37 years! With those three hour weekly sessions, my drawing really improved. House of Cards was a big leap in my figure drawing ability. Like the demo of how three strokes of paint made a shiny knocker. This was another  epiphany. Other epiphanies about what good painting could be came later.

 Sharmon: Epiphanies—tell me more about those!

Katherine: In 1985 I was lucky to take a two-week workshop paid for by the State of California for art professors in the Cal State system. There were three amazing teachers running that workshop: John Navva, Gabriel Laderman and Martha Erlebacher, all figurative painters. In the painting world, once you are a teacher, it is rare to find someone to critique you. People would tell you, “Oh, I love your paintings,” but in my own mind—I’d seen so many paintings in so many museums—I wanted to improve.

One breakthrough came when I did an assignment by Gabriel Laderman. It had to do with creating meaning, not just through the image, but through the conscious placement of shapes and space.  His exercise helps you understand how the visual experience is really about getting the viewer to enter into your painting and move around it. I got that! It gave me an understanding of why it is so pleasurable and interesting for me to stand in front of paintings. How entering into a painting, not just through the image, but though shapes and paths, causes one to ruminate, thus allowing the viewer to discover new meanings. That exercise completely changed how I set up my paintings. So that was an epiphany! San Gregorio was one of the first paintings where I put this to use. Moonlight at the beach. Lots of triangles to get the viewer to wander around the painting.  

It was in that workshop that I finally found, what I would call, a mentor. Martha Erlebacher was thirteen years older than I. I’d never had anyone look so hard at my paintings with a critical eye towards my subject matter and technique. For me that was a gift. She understood my frustration with re-inventing the wheel every time I started a painting. I was thrilled! Her life was spent trying to recreate and use the techniques of the Renaissance Masters in a modern world. She taught anatomy and painting at the New York Academy, which were very regimented classes.  She had a system of painting, which she taught, that allowed her to concentrate on her images without having to rely on chance. I know this sounds a bit restrictive, but I also realized it could be liberating—another epiphany! Martha was also a rigorous thinker and said I needed to be smarter!  She gave me a long list of books to read, mostly theory, from Painting as an Art by Richard Wollheim to Sexual Persona by Camille Paglia. 

What Martha did was force me to confront why I painted figures. She challenged me to understand the choice of figure painting and representation. She asked me, “Why are you painting these figures?” 

Representational painting is not the same as a photograph. You are not recording the visible world the same way a photograph does. You are making choices about everything you put in the painting.  This made me look at painting in a totally different way. That’s what I got from Laderman and Erlebacher: a way of seeing how non-figurative elements can add meaning to a representational composition. It can support your theme and point of view in subtle ways without having to be pedantic. I now believe that this can be a powerful way to engage the viewer. An epiphany! 

Martha and I wrote letters, handwritten letters, back and forth over a ten year period. I would read a book and I would want to talk about it, so I’d write these long letters to Martha and she would write long letters back with her sharp insight. Martha was so generous with her time. She was an artist, a teacher, wife and mother. She had two boys and a wonderful husband, sculptor Walter Erlebacher. I didn’t have children when we met, but when my children were born, she was such a role model and supporter. 

Sharmon: You had a long teaching career. How did teaching influence you? Did it help or did it hinder your work?

Katherine: When you teach, you learn more than you give, because you have to learn it in order to teach it. My teaching was very much a part of my creativity and very satisfying. The basics have to be taught but I always tried to make it interesting not just for the students but for me. No class was ever the same twice! We had life drawing class where we made sculptures because I desperately wanted to do a sculpture. I took my classes on field trips. We’d get in a van and go up to San Francisco to see an art show. It was all part of my education, and they were along for the ride. Up until I had my first child in 1988 I had no trouble teaching and painting, but after my second child was born in 1993 I have to say the painting became harder to make time for. I still kept up my weekly life drawing group and continued teaching but I loved the kids and they also became a creative outlet!

Sharmon: You had a number of shows in the Palo Alto area between 1979 and 1989. I like this quote from a review of the 1979 show:

  “Bazak paints single women in interiors—as traditional a subject as can be. . . Actually, the paintings explore a dual subject. On a formal level, they emphasize the quality of light, another age-old and fundamental painterly concern, which Bazak is in the process of developing in a personal way. The other theme, the relationship of the women to their environments, clearly has broader, extra-pictorial implications.”

Stacey Moss, The Peninsula Times Tribune, April 13, 1979

Katherine: As I said most of my models were friends. For the Nautilus it was all about the evocative color of her amazing cascading copper hair contrasted by the blue pants and punctuated by the red shoes. I wanted the color to be seductive. She’s ruminating in her own space and I want the viewer to ruminate as well. The nautilus brings sound and water to the meditation.  

I’ve always been a lover of Japanese architecture and and I have these vintage magazines from Japan. I would get these magazines just to look at.  My home has 48 shoji screens and the light is so soft.  The model had brought this beautiful scarf and fan as props.  When she picked up the scarf the light, the birds on the scarf, and her silhouetted body became magical. I wanted to paint it! The sexual aspect is there, but secondary to a private moment.

As you can see, I also played around with a traditional use of the mirror as a pond or as an entrance to another world. Same model, same room, different color harmonies. In the “Interruption” the fish on the chair drape and the birds in the rug design work like an inter species communication, which I love. There is also the light which plays an important part in  allowing the rumination’s, the “what ifs”.  We are always trying to make light an important part of our ideal rooms, to let it in and allow it to change the mood of the room                                                                          

Sharmon: This reviewer makes astute comments about The Swimmer:

“At first glance, Bazak’s work might be placed in the same category with Edward Hopper’s paintings of solitary and lonely people. On second glance, however, it is happy “Hopper.” The woman does not seem sad. She has that neither-here-nor-there look that comes after a period of grueling sports activity—peaceful fatigue. I could readily identify with the painting.”

The Swimmer, Al Morch, Examiner

Sharmon: Tell me how you came up with the composition for The Swimmer.

Katherine: Diana was friend and model she had just come from swimming. Before modeling she wanted to lay down for a few moments.  She had this great bathing suit that was blue with leaves on it and she had these goggles. When she lay down and put her goggles on the night table, I thought, “oh, the goggles look like a bra!” The window shade had a cool cast with the warm light sneaking around the sides, and I thought, “it’s like a Danae! She’s sleeping and she’s about to be seduced by the light.” I don’t think I was thinking about athletic fatigue!

 Sharmon: This review talks about your paintings of scenes from European myths. You have one called Waxing and Waning and one of Persephone:

  “Katherine Bazak provides a valuable contribution. . . that retells and reinterprets several essential elements of western European culture in a narrative setting that allows a reassessment of the present value of this tradition.”

Stacey Moss, The Peninsula Times Tribune, April 13, 1979

Katherine: I am not remembering what paintings were in that show particular show, but these more recent paintings might speak to this point. My original desire was to paint the landscape around my house. I did a series of paintings that represented the different seasons, a very western cultural theme. Waxing and Waning is a summer/fall landscape and Persephone was a winter/spring one. I had been looking at the Leonardo paintings at the Louvre and noticed how he used a “wipe out” method to achieve textures in the landscapes in his paintings so I thought I would try that. I used that method for much of the painting especially the rendering of the grasses and ferns.

I have a White Goddess, which is the buckeye pulling the man up. That’s my buckeye, but I painted it whiter than it really is. And I made the branches come down his arm, so that’s pulling him up: waxing; while the other figure is going to sleep (like the rocks): waning. The tree could be Mother Nature—but it’s not, it is simply a Buckeye. 

In the painting Persephone I  have a slightly suggestive phallic shape in the dark damp earth which alludes to her underground abduction. And the foliage is very much like pubic hair—but it’s not. The painting has these parts that don’t “scream” the theme, but gives the viewer an opportunity to discover other meanings. Painting as metaphor.  

The House of Cards could reference an annunciation or a strategic pause!

I also did a series of my friends working while still maintaining a meditative, internal theme to the compositions.

Sharmon: Let’s talk about the computer art course that you developed, because I remember that it led you to do a lot of art on the computer. 

Katherine: In 1993 I volunteered to develop a digital painting class at Cañada College. Silicon Valley was, after all, the birthplace of digital media. I was not tech savvy and had never turned on a computer. It was Nanette Wylde, Kent Manske who initiated me into the world of computers and graphic/painting applications. It was very exciting for me—a new medium! Hewlett Packard and Apple gave us all this free equipment, Macs and PCs and printers.  You could get money for supplies and equipment so easily, whereas for the art department, there was no money.

That was a great 15 years in the multimedia dept. We pushed ourselves and the students to the limit. We did rotoscoping, animation and scripting where you could record your movements and create animated paintings. There were programs like Poser that allowed you to create a wireframe figure, pose it and apply muscles. Photoshop and Illustrator were new apps then. We did so much with printers. We did wax printing! I learned so much until the students knew more about computer applications than I did, then I retired!  But, the reality was that I could teach art students the computer easier than the computer students art. For some reason they thought the computer would do that, it couldn’t then but maybe it can now. I prefer the brush!

Sharmon: People have written about your work, but do you have your own description of your style?

Katherine: Should I major in art? Am I an artist? Do I have a personal style? Will I be able to make a living wage?  

I have been asked these questions many times by students during my 30 years of teaching. My answer, if I was truthful would be, “If you have to ask these questions, then no!  Like the Harry Potter sorting hat, the creative life chooses you.” I find that most creative people, no matter what the field, are curious people. My trips to art museums at an early age not only reinforced and influenced my love of the visual arts, but also gave me a wonderful perspective from which to see the world around me. 

I like to think that I live an artistic life, that how I make decisions and act on them is from the artistic point of view. Yes the years between 1979-89 were my most fruitful years in terms of painting, but during that time I also designed my house, the house that I have always wanted to ruminate in. My husband and I and built it over 14 years. Literally, we lifted the beams, did everything ourselves. I love my space.  

I keep coming back to the idea that my paintings are my ruminations. I enter the painting and ruminate about what if…what if I do this with it, or that? My paintings—my house—my garden, they make me ruminate!

I am an optimist. I love the human body and people are interesting to me, they do things—create, build, move and imagine “what if?  I realize that I am a ruminator and looking back on all my paintings I realize my subjects are all ruminating!

---

Sharmon Hilfinger is a Bay Area playwright and musician living in Argentina and California. Hillfinger’s produced plays include three dramas and nine ensemble plays with music in collaboration with composer Joan McMillen. These have been produced by San Francisco Bay Area theatre companies, including The Pear Theatre, TheatreFIRST, Inferno Theatre, Menlo Player’s Guild, BootStrap Theater Foundation, as well as Heartland Theatre Company in Illinois. In 1998, she founded BootStrap Theater Foundation which develops and produces original plays by Bay Area playwrights.