Tropical birds such as Toucan or Merengue are recurring motifs in the work of Katherine Bernhardt. Although pop culture icons played a role in Bernhardt’s art early on: Babar, Garfield, Pac-Man, Lisa Simpson, the Smurfs. By Bernhardt’s own admission, she is an art factory. “I’m always making a lot of stuff. I never feel like I have enough pictures. … I like to be busy,” she said in an interview with Art This Week. “I don’t think about it when I make them – I just make them. … I’m always making new things,” she said in a conversation at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

“I make five paintings a day,” she said in her studio, a former auto paint shop in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood. At the time, she was awaiting the end of construction on her new storage, exhibition and work space in a 17,000-square-foot former car dealership in St. Louis, Missouri, where she grew up and her parents still live.

Critics have interpreted Bernhardt’s pattern paintings as a critique of globalization and consumer culture, scenes of a ruined world littered with trash. But like other smart artists, she neither excludes nor endorses a particular reading of her work, and when she talks about it herself, she usually focuses on the surfaces. Looking at the canvas on the floor of her studio, she pointed out the puddles and drips of still-wet acrylic and, in particular, an area where one color had blossomed into the field of another.

“I’m really interested in what the water does,” she said. “That’s more interesting to me than what I can do now.”

Bernhardt began seriously studying art in high school, but she knew little about the practice or the history of art, aside from the Renaissance works her father took her to see in museums. “I was painting still lifes of Nike shoes,” she says. “I was doing this papier-mâché stuff, like a cake, different objects, and I was painting with that. She also painted Michael Jackson and E.T.

She later studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and at a landscape painting exchange program in Italy, where she learned various traditional techniques. But by her own account, she educated herself largely self-taught, taking her direction outside the classroom. She discovered Impressionism through the Art Institute of Chicago’s famous collection. A friend showed her a book of the colorful abstract works of artist Mary Heilmann.

“I had no idea,” she says. “I remember coming to New York one time and my friend said, ‘Don’t go to that gallery, that’s a bad art gallery,’ and I didn’t understand what she was talking about. I didn’t know anything about contemporary art at all.”

At SVA, Bernhardt spent much of her free time visiting galleries and museums, a habit she maintains to this day – any space in her studio not devoted to work or storage is filled with works by artists she admires. While in college, she interned at Team Gallery on the Lower East Side, which accepted her into their program after graduation. In 2005, she began exhibiting at Gallery Canada, which she still represents.

By Bernhardt’s own admission, her art should not be taken too seriously. From an interview with Artspace Magazine, “The best painters don’t intellectualize their work. They just make something.” From an interview with White Hot: “I tried to make the dumbest or funniest painting I could.” From her talk at The Modern in Fort Worth: “I want humor in my artwork. … I like to put things in that don’t make sense.” From her interview with me: “There should be humor in art. People should laugh or think it’s silly.”