By Alexander Rivero, Staff Writer

Katie Weiss spent a good portion of her life in Queens, Brooklyn, and on the Upper West Side before coming over to Berkeley Heights, where she has lived for the past twenty years. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Connecticut in Clothing and Textiles, and a graduate degree in Painting from Queens College. 

Now, Weiss spends a good portion of her life in nature and in museums, which serve as the primary sources of nourishment for the lush, dreamlike scenes she captures on her canvas. 

Her world is one of light, shadow, and space—open marshlands and rolling hills, games of light on the silhouettes of faceless pedestrian, urban streets hiding from the noon sun under the dark shade of skyscrapers. To look at them is to relive an instance you recall but cannot quite place, a nostalgia for a moment that perhaps never occurred. There is a longing to each of these subjects that instills a sense of pause in the viewer, however quiet the scene, or however busy. One’s eyes linger on each painting before they turn to the next.

Weiss painted and drew as a kid, but it was the art history classes she took at UConn that tilted what may have been a curiosity over to a love. Indeed, she describes her feelings when first exposed to college-level courses on classical culture and Renaissance painting as having “fallen in love” with these worlds, moments in her life she looks back to as ones of profound changes in her own sensitivities, interests, and ways of seeing her world. 

“After graduating,” she says, “my interests moved beyond the fields that I studied, and I took a few art classes. What I really did was redirected myself, and aside from studying art I also became a high school art teacher to pay the rent.”

She taught studio art at Flushing High School in Queens and, during her private time, acquainted herself with her own capacities as an artist. In the thirty years she taught high school art, she supplemented her education with deep dives into the worlds that interested her most. She found, in that time, that the landscapes of John Constable were models worth studying. She also marveled at Rembrandt’s touch, as well as that of the rest of the Dutch Masters. She fell in love again—this time with the Impressionists, and later on again, with the American Hudson River School of painters. 

Nature, too, plays a big role in the quiet, internal grind of her artistic exploration. 

“I love movies and novels, but nature is the main inspiration for me,” she says. “I walk every day, and nature is

always changing. Even the winter landscapes that appear plain and unchanging at first sight, change day to day. The sky changes, even if the trees stay the same.” 

Weiss also notes that she takes regular day trips into Manhattan to spend hours upon hours gazing up at the paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

The most difficult thing for Weiss to determine in all of her craft, she says, is knowing when she is finished with a painting. Like the winter skies, a painting also is in a perpetual state of change and evolution, she says, and it is a difficult task to put one’s foot down and refrain from adding anything new to a canvas that has no clearly defined way of indicating it is complete. 

Equally difficult is the act of picking out a favorite painting of hers, namely because, she laughs, her favorite tends to be the one she has finished most recently. There is a great deal of sense to this. 

“You’re continually growing as an artist,” she says, “so naturally your most recent work is always the one. You look at it and tell yourself, ‘I really got the shadows in that one, or the sense of wind.’ But also I can look at something I did twenty years ago as if though it was done by someone else. As if though it were something on its own. And that’s also pretty cool.”

As for future work and projects, Weiss says she hopes to just be able to continue painting for as long as she can, and will continue her work with Frontline Arts in Branchburg, NJ, which she assures does plenty of excellent work with veterans. 

For more information on Katie Weiss, please visit her website: www.katieweissart.com, or email her at kweiss3@verizon.net.