Who even am I?

Biography

Well… technically, I'm Kathy Mercure, the artist behind Kat Paints Watercolour. 

I'm a Canadian painter of mainly botanical impressions in watercolour and have lived in many places across Canada, currently in Moncton, New Brunswick .

I've always been a creative, but before painting became my passion, I was a long time writer in marketing, communications, and freelancing. 

I've been painting watercolours in earnest since 2020, when I picked up the brush during lockdown. After a few years of dabbling in a bit of everything, but never finding my creative lane, I was inspired to try impressing botanicals into watercolour after using cutouts of paper leaves in a painting and deciding to experiment with the real thing.

I know that I create because I must, but when I say these things in my head, that four-year-old Kacky, ‘my little’ as I call her, always asks, ‘but why?”

Painting calms the ragey beast inside me. The most important thing in my life has always been beauty (not just human beauty, but experiencing it, in all its forms, with all my senses), and painting allows me to create beautiful colours crashing together, to use nature to nurture my own self, and hopefully, finally give my ‘little’, Kacky, her own sense of peace and understanding of ‘why?’.

I found my ‘why’ in the ‘how’.

My painting style is bold and intensely colourful. Adding leaves, grasses, and blooms to vibrant colour instantly hooked me on the process, its lack of control, and how beautiful the end result can be.

Every day I look forward to putting all my “what if I tried” ideas into motion.

My Work

I think colour is the most beautiful thing ever…

My favourite way to paint is to lay down water and add colours that flow and crash together, fight for dominance, and in the end, create the most beautiful patterns and new colours. I get a thrill walking that tightrope between abject failure and giddy surprise at how I created something so beautiful.

I am inspired by nature and the beauty I see in my walks around the pond where I live, clipping  grasses, leaves, and blooms from nature to take home to use immediately or to press and dry. I spend a good deal of my time ‘squirelling away’ botanicals to use year round.

I rarely use brushes, instead I splash lots of water and paint onto paper and then lay botanicals onto the paper and impress them with weight and time (plus a little magic).

I typically finish my botanical impressions paintings with metallic accents. When I release them to the air, they dry, and the most astoundingly beautiful images and textures sometimes appear on the paper. I feel like a modern day alchemist…

A picture of memsmiling woman with my curly grey hair and glasses, an orange and red scarf, and a gray sweater, indoors.

“Wildflowers can’t be controlled. That’s what makes them so beautiful.”

Contact me

I hope you fall in love with my art and although I’d love for you to find a piece you must have, I’d also appreciate your thoughts and comments. You can also join my mailing list for access to a free digital version of one of my paintings.

If you’re interested in working together to create something beautiful, or have questions, contact me and I’ll be in touch shortly. I can’t wait to see what we can create together!