Watercolor on Arches, 40 × 24 in., 2025
Katie DeGroot paints what most people walk past without looking down — the gnarled branch, the shaggy moss, the fungi quietly doing their work inside a decomposing trunk. Her watercolors are discovered on walks through woodlands and hikes through unkept forests, and sometimes the subject comes home with her, hauled into the studio to be painted from life. The result is work that finds genuine beauty in decay and peculiarity — not the tidy beauty of a flower arrangement, but the wilder, stranger kind that rewards those who pay attention to the ground beneath their feet.
Blues II is a large and generous work — 40 inches tall, the kind of painting that takes up real space on a wall and holds it. The blues that give it its name are the particular blues of moss and lichen and shadow, the colors that exist in a forest at that moment just before your eyes fully adjust. Framed and ready to hang.