Painted in Montreal.
Designed in California.
Worn everywhere.

Katarina — Kati to her family and friends — who was Transylvanian by birth, was nothing if not resilient. She was forced to uproot and reinvent herself time and again out of necessity. Later in life, when she found herself alongside her two sons and husband moving to Montreal, she set up and ran a small but successful textile studio in the Côte-des-Neiges borough. She was a fashion designer and seamstress (and, for a chapter of her life, a baker and cafe owner), and she sold some of her textile designs commercially — mostly to companies that printed linens and towels. But the most personal work she kept for herself.

Her paintings drew on the Modern and Surrealist movements and the decorative line of Art Nouveau — artists like Koloman Moser in particular — filtered through the color and groove of the '60s and '70s. Botanicals, folk geometrics, light through a Montreal window.

For her granddaughters, she sewed their clothes, made paper fashion dolls and painted them their own little wardrobes. When she passed, she left behind over 300 original hand-painted textile designs — tucked inside her black portfolio case, where it sat for years in her son's basement. Hundreds of worlds, just waiting.