November Artist Spotlight
Meet Katherine Fast
Many thanks to the welcoming and supportive WSA community for this opportunity to share my story. I began dabbling in watercolor after retiring from a long (some would say eclectic) corporate career of forty-five years.
I fell in love with the vivid colors, translucence, and play of light possible using the medium. My paintings are realistic (well, recognizable). Subjects are often pets, people, situations that tell a story or evoke emotion, or treasures from the past that make me smile.
Throughout the last fourteen years I’ve taken lessons from some of the best and most patient instructors through Weston Council on Aging programs and other outside workshops: Paul Alie, Paul George, Marla Greenfield, Andrew Kusmin, Sally Meding, Mary Jo Rines, Dawn Scaltreto, Tony Visco and Nancy Walton. In addition to WSA, I’ve been honored to show with the Needham Arts Association, New England Watercolor Society, the Scituate Art Association and the Rhode Island Watercolor Society.
There is no discernable pattern in my story. With a BA in history from Oberlin and a year as an admissions counselor under my belt, I ventured from Ohio to Boston where there was absolutely no need for history majors.
Through a typing gig, I wangled a job managing Ford and Carnegie Foundation grants at the Sloan School of Management and then joined several MIT faculty member’s spin off consulting companies, first in management information systems and then in quantitative market research, evaluating consumer products prior to market launch— stuff like shampoos, crackers, nicotine gum, frozen tacos, dried baby food, ant and roach killers—challenging work and a great source of frequent flyer miles.
I had no business working alongside quantitative genii except that I could translate technical terms into plain English for brand managers…calling a centroid a dot, a vector a line, not to mention the contortions of explaining multinomial logit models. While cavorting in the land of regressions, I also played violin with the MIT symphony for nine years and studied graphology, handwriting analysis.
My next adventure involved using handwriting analysis for hiring decisions, counseling, jury selection, threat letters and forgeries. Finally, as a head hunter I recommended myself for my last honest job, teaching seminars to large corporations and government agencies here and abroad on how to organize and present complex business documents.
Free at last, I began scribbling and dabbling. After publishing a few short stories. I joined three other writers and became a contributing editor and compositor of six anthologies: Best New England Crime Stories. I parlayed one short story into a mystery, and just sent my third novel off to the publisher. (Check ‘em out: Katfast.com)
Somewhere along the line I settled in Weston and married my college sweetheart twenty years after graduation. He retired last year after fifty-one years of teaching English, the last thirty-five at the Belmont Hill School. It’s been a fun and rewarding ride. Now I can cherish free time to paint and play with words, and relax with my husband, mouthy German Shepherd and three tuxedo cats.
