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Remembering Joan Katri

Morris Graves Museum of Art

Joan Katri passed recently. She was a revered artist.
The Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka honors her with a show from April 1-23rd.
On display are her familiar work of Ferndale landscapes and flowers. Also included are her
most recent work of birds playfully alive with color. Her paintings are loved and sought after.
Joan’s pictures are radiant. They encapsulate the essence of the seasons, the rolling fog,
 the boundless ocean, the changing puffs of white clouds and the small birds passing over
Ferndale. 

Her painting career began in New York after art school. Joan considered herself an abstract
artist. Big city life paled compared to her beloved Ferndale. Joan came home.
The Katri’s small house on the edge of town, adjoined the Bansen dairy. Growing up in the 1950’s, a single family earned a modest living milking 60 cows on that field. As a child, Mary Ann Bansen remembers following her father around while he worked. Joan’s Dad would lean out the window and offer him a glass of water during haying season. Old time dairy folks watched over the fields. Their soul was one with the land.  They embraced the open air, feeling the exhilaration of a coming storm.   They recounted how they would listen and they could hear the earth speak to them.

Steeped in memories, Joan painted her own connection to Ferndale land. From the windows of the house she grew up in, her paintings of the Eel Valley took form. What she loved, lay all around her. She worked there for the rest of her life.

To express her feeling—Joan Katri evolved a painting style wherein quick abstract brush
strokes embody the changing sky and revolving seasons. Next, with razor blades, bits of cardboard
and combs, particular events took shape: furrowed fields, fences, a path through the dunes.
These tools developed into her signature style, a personal language, describing everything: windows, flowers and most recently, thickets, berry branches, and denoting local field birds.
Her skill and definitive precision enabled her to work on an ever smaller, more intimate scale.
A 2 x 2 inch canvas in Joan’s eloquent short-hand, enchants like the beauty of a Haiku poem.

In response to the COVID lockdown, Joan painted every day. Her goal was to make a 1000
miniature paintings she envisioned as ‘prayers’— made for a world in crisis.  Before the year ended, she had made 3000 of them.  Joan Katri leaves behind a timeless legacy of Ferndale and our rural area we can all delight in.

In addition to the Morris Graves Museum, Joan Katri has exhibited in galleries including the
Van Straaten in Chicago, IL, Kauffman Galleries in Houston, TX, Gallery 44 in Denver, CO.
Locally, she was a member of the Ferndale Arts Gallery and had been represented by Piante
Gallery, Eureka for many years. Many of her larger works went into corporate and private
collections such as Price Waterhouse, Marriott Hotels, and IBM.

DATES/TIMES

WHERE

• Morris Graves Museum of Art

PRICE

• Free