She founded the University of Oregon printmaking program and taught there for twenty years, creating more than ten thousand paintings and prints in her lifetime.

[2] She was adopted at the age of six weeks and raised on a farm outside of Portland by her great aunt and uncle, James Martin and Hannah (Wrolstad) Erickson.

[2][3] She attended the University of Oregon in Eugene on an art scholarship, working in the summers at the Commercial Iron Works shipyards in Portland as a scaler scraping ships' hulls to remove rust, and eventually as a blueprint machine operator at another shipyard ironworks, Poole McGonigle.

[2] After finishing her degree at the University of Oregon in 1946, she married Labrecht Gerhard Krause,b a World War II veteran whom she had known since elementary school.

[2] They returned to Portland two years later, where Krause became interested in woodcuts and etching by 1956, and printmaking by 1958, as a half-time student at the Museum Art School.

[2] Divorced in 1960, Krause taught children's classes at the Museum Art School, and attended there half-time as a student.

She exhibited her paintings for sale in a beauty parlor and in the hallway of a Gay Nineties tavern in southwest Portland.

The Portland Art Museum quotes Krause's biography printed in Oregon Painters: the First Hundred Years (1859–1959), noting that in 1959 her style shifted to abstract expressionism: Her palette ranged from hot purple, red, and turquoise to cool pastels, with the color applied in repeating bands.