The Collection

Kate Salenfriend is a California-born artist whose richly layered paintings fuse personal history, environmental connection, and luminous materiality. Surrounded by artistic inspiration from an early age, she was first taught by her great-grandfather, Stewart Robertson, a registered California portrait painter, who introduced her to the foundations of art while she was still a child. Growing up in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, Salenfriend developed a deep bond with the land, keenly attuned to its atmosphere, shifting light, and seasonal rhythms. These formative experiences informed her first professional series, Order from Chaos, a collection of Cypress tree paintings that became widely collected.

Now based in the Napa Valley, Salenfriend continues to interpret the natural world through a distinctive visual language that unites place, memory, and texture. Inspired by the crumbling reliefs of Pompeii during travels in Italy, she builds sculptural depth into her paintings with layered oil paint. To this she adds luminous gold, silver, and copper leaf, recalling the shimmering works of Gustav Klimt while evoking nature’s transience and the emotional resonance of landscape. The interaction of leaf and ambient light creates shifting surfaces that echo cycles of growth, change, and renewal.

Salenfriend’s works are held in numerous private and public collections throughout the Napa Valley and beyond, including Darioush Winery, Skipstone Ranch, Bouchaine Vineyards, Ehlers Estate, the Robert Mondavi tasting room, and the Getty Family Trust, as well as the collections of Ray and Dagmar Dolby. Her paintings are also represented in the permanent holdings of institutions such as Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital (Stanford), Vanderbilt University Hospital, and Levi’s Stadium (Santa Clara, CA), and are collected internationally.