Biography

Katherine MacDonald (b. 1953) is a Canadian painter best known for her direct, intimately observed portraits and her long-term collaborations with her female subjects. She lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario.

MacDonald was born into a family of artists. Her father, T.R. MacDonald (1908–1978), and mother, Rae Hendershot (1921–1988), were figurative painters of modern urban life, and MacDonald was raised in a home closely affiliated with Canadian modernist artistic communities.

After completing her training in Fine Art at New Brunswick’s Mount Allison University in 1976, she returned to Hamilton to establish her studio. Over a career spanning five decades, MacDonald has exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the McMaster Museum of Art. Her work is found in private and public collections in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Asia.

MacDonald’s art reimagines portraiture for our times as a living document of human relationships. In her practice, MacDonald collaborates with models for years and, in some cases, decades. Her commitment to direct observation permits, in her art, an unfolding of the subject’s unexpected beauty and complexity.

Still life is an important complementary practice in MacDonald’s body of work. Her still lifes reveal the poignancy of objects shaped by use—worn clothing, a broken cup, a sculpture maquette, used pencils—small portraits of the detritus of our lives.

Since 2024, MacDonald has focused on small-format pieces that instill a discipline of formal concision. “There is a challenge,” she says, “in working in a small format while trying to retain a sense of scale and breadth of vision.”