Nothing will send someone to Zillow searching for Hill Country properties faster than a visit to the painter Kate Zimmerman Turpin's home. Her light green house, with its vast yard, sits on a quiet and very Tree of Life-coded street in Fredericksburg. Inside, her husband, Luke, is currently occupying their two children; out back, an exterior white wall by the stairs is a murderous tableau of tiny muddy handprints. One of the family's two dogs, a bloodhound named Dandy, stretches out in the backyard, her belly folded like bellows and her jowls pooling beneath her head. Across the backyard is a renovated square outbuilding-Zimmerman Turpin's studio-with big casement windows that look out over a gray-and-brown winter scene. Periodically, the artist's donkey, Romeo, a Christmas gift from Luke, pokes his head through one of the windows to greet her.
Some 100,000 people are familiar with Zimmerman Turpin's aesthetic from Instagram. Before she was a painter, she was a photographer who built a large following sharing scenes from her travels, and then from motherhood. But now she mostly features her paintings, which are perpetually sold out, immediately pounced upon by collectors who lust after them for their color and scale.
