Kathe Fraga grew up in a naval family, moving between both coasts of the United States, South America, and Europe — Quito, Paris, Copenhagen, London — spending anywhere from six months to five years in each place. The exposure to old-world interiors, gilded churches, faded palace walls, and Asian decorative arts accumulated over years before she studied at the US International University in Sussex, England, the Université de Grenoble in France, and the University of Washington in Seattle. Her first career was as an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Honolulu.
She and her husband Jeff eventually settled on Bainbridge Island, where they ran Gallery Fraga on Winslow Way for six years before she turned fully to painting. She lives and works in a 110-year-old home built of barnacled beach rock. Chinoiserie — the European decorative tradition born in the 17th and 18th centuries, when French and English craftsmen invented a fantasy version of China layered onto wallpapers, lacquerware, silk, and porcelain — is her subject and her structure.
The tradition runs from Boucher and Pillement through Delft tile and Chippendale furniture; the MET’s 2015 exhibition “China: Through the Looking Glass” was the highest-attended show in the museum’s costume history and directly inspired her 2017 collaboration with Clé de Peau Beauté. Fraga’s specific contribution is the surface: acrylic with gold ink and gold leaf applied to a frescoed birch panel, then sealed with a glossy lacquer glaze. The fresco ground — powdery, slightly rough, reading as aged plaster — is what separates her work from other Chinoiserie-inspired painting.
The surface already looks like a wall that has been there for two hundred years. In Roses Are Red, The frescoed birch ground displays a chalky, mineral finish—a powdery plaster skin through which cadmium orange and deep alizarin reds bleed and pool unevenly, creating zones of saturated color interrupted by bare, scraped patches of raw wood. Gold leaf and gold ink scatter across this damaged surface in two registers: dense, almost suffocating clusters of schematized peonies and plum blossoms in the upper reaches, and larger, more legible chrysanthemum and rose forms in the lower center, their metallic outlines catching on the textured ground like paint catching on gesso.
Kathe's work is shown across both Bainbridge and Park City. Browse the full collection — medium, dimensions, and price visible on every piece.
