Printmaker Katharine Watson lives on the outskirts of Portland in a brightly painted Victorian house surrounded by flowers. There’s bushy lavender, drowsy peonies, and fragrant roses climbing up and down a trellis. “I didn’t really think about it until someone pointed it out to me,” she says, “but I think gardening has inspired my artwork.” It’s funny how one can walk so far down a path without realizing it. But Watson has found her way through the thicket and, bit by bit, grown a business that sustains her lifestyle—garden and all. 

I am visiting Watson’s backyard studio in late June, on a rare sunny day sandwiched between weeks of rain. Inside the two-story converted barn, Watson designs, sketches, cuts, and prints her intricate images, which she sells as affordable art prints, licenses to businesses, and prints on stationery, cards, towels, and mugs. “It’s a bit messy in here because we just had a class,” Watson explains, though I see no real evidence of disorder. Maybe her shelves are a little untidy, but I can’t tell, since the colorful inks have been hung up in straight rows and the shelves stocked with carefully labeled boxes of stationery, piles of prints and tea towels, and folded quilts (naturally dyed with madder and indigo, hand-printed in India). Or perhaps I am too distracted by the walls, which are covered in images of sunflowers, tomatoes, strawberries, and coneflower. The studio is busy and bursting, doors open to the garden, and the smell of roses drifts in. 

According to Watson, it’s not always this idyllic. Winters are her busy period, when she spends less time in the garden, more time working on the computer and fulfilling orders. In the past, she’s created custom designs for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chronicle Books, and Hygge and West, and she’s licensed her work to the likes of Loeffler Randall and Minted. “Summer feels like the time when I’m percolating ideas. The early summer is my very favorite time in Maine,” she explains. “It’s a time when I can let things settle. I begin to see the garden come back, and I see these big projects on the horizon.” Fall is for wholesale; winter is for holiday shopping. Later in the year, Watson will be busy with images of flowers and plants, some of which she dreams up, whole cloth. 

“Working from nature is actually a newer thing for me,” she says. “For a long time, I was just using imagined flowers and plants in my art. That is my favorite thing, not to work from any species of plant. But as I started doing my garden series, people would say, ‘Oh, is this a cosmos? I love cosmos.’ Now I do both literal flowers and imagined.” She points to a teal print that hangs on the studio wall near the stairs. “That one, I did 12 years ago. People still request it, and it still sells. It feels very succinct to me, that piece.” There’s no flower exactly like it in her garden, but it doesn’t matter. It looks rather like a cosmos, or maybe a hibiscus. The pattern repeats, the blooming flower and the curling leaves. Like many of Watson’s pieces, there’s both symmetry and wildness, evidence of restraint and joyful flourishes. 

Although she paints and quilts, Watson explains that printmaking suits her best because of its limitations. “I had no interest in printmaking until I took a class in college,” she recalls. “I signed up because it fit into my schedule.” She found herself immediately drawn to the medium. She had always loved textiles, and she liked working with paint, but cutting linoleum was fun in a different way. The monochromatic designs appealed to her, as did the permanence of each slice of the pie. Unlike oils, where you can paint over any mistakes and work for years on a single canvas, printmaking is a subtractive process. Once you’ve cut a piece of linoleum, you can’t glue it back together. There’s an end point and an element of chaos.
“I like that there is a separation between myself and the finished product,” she says. “You have to surrender a lot of control with printmaking. You never know what it will look like at the end. There’s a moment when you get to admire your own work as if you didn’t create it.”

Watson’s work has changed over the decade she’s been in business, though the backbone of her style has remained the same. She’s become known for her linear, stylized images of nature and her quirky, repetitive patterns. In addition to her plant-inspired pieces, she makes prints of teapots and garden tools—items that would feel right at home in a British cottage garden. “I grew up in London and Hong Kong, so I’m really a city girl,” she explains early in our meeting, much to my surprise. However, even as a kid, Watson played among flowers. First, on a London houseboat (where she lived until she was 13), then later in the streets of Hong Kong. Her mother was a floral designer, and while she didn’t work when Watson was little, she did volunteer her services to their local church and school. “When we moved to Hong Kong, it was really hard at first,” she says. “I was very lonely, so I retreated into art projects to keep me entertained and comforted.” Over the years, Watson grew to love the international hub, particularly the markets. “So many of the supplies for the fashion industries get shipped through Hong Kong, so you can find 10,000 kinds of buttons, 10,000 kinds of sequins, and all these different fabrics from around the world,” Watson explains. “That informed my style. It was such a great thing to fuel my creativity.” 

While Watson’s parents still live abroad (on another houseboat; “we’re boat people,” Watson says), she’s committed fully to Maine. It’s been her home for the past eight years, and she can’t imagine being anywhere else. “When I first got here, the backyard was all asphalt,” she says. “It took a long time to rip it up and build a garden.” For this urbanite-turned-plant-nerd, Portland has proved the perfect balance of city and country, busy and laid-back. “At first, I would get freaked out when business got slow. But now I trust that it’s just a phase and that things will pick back up.” It’s just a season like any other. Plus, Watson waits all year until “rose week.” Then it arrives, and fills the world with fragrance. “You have to appreciate it while it’s here,” she says. “And I love the anticipation.”