Kate Resek moved into her loft on the Bowery in 1978. She raised her family of two children in Leonia, NJ. She moved to a loft to work and live in at 354 Bowery, New York, NY.
Her childhood was during the depression; she was born in 1929. Her father’s jobs took him all over Ohio and West Virginia building schools for the government. She came from a family of architects, both her father and brother, and her mother was an interior designer. Because they moved often they were a close family tied to their nightly ritual of drawing and listening to the radio.
When her children started school, she went to Columbia University, getting an MFA in 1965. She received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin in 1951. In 1978, she moved to the Bowery studio.
She drew with pastels on paper and painted with acrylic on canvas. At some point she combined the two mediums and began drawing with pastel on raw canvas and finishing the work with acrylic washes, which gave a tone to the canvas, but more importantly acted as a fixative for the chalks. She always worked with paper and canvas on the floor. Eventually the pastels became denser and the acrylic washes lighter, until she used exclusively pastels. The paintings were approximately 4' x 4 1/2' and she continued to do pastel drawings approximately 20" x 24" on paper. She still enjoys the smoothness of the paper and the rough tooth of raw canvas for pastels. The canvas left raw becomes the ‘white’ of the painting.
She sold her loft in 2009 after living and working there for over 30 years.