Katie.Gallery

My largest influence has been Australian Aboriginal painters. Their commitment to the present moment and the idea of painting as a community story, is an important part of the process. I love the idea of the nothing that is the Outback, and how painters there have created an industry for themselves out of the stories of their lives and history. My favorite, Dorothy Napangardi and the other Napangardi sisters, have a painted language that echoes through time.

My spiritual experience is always extremely profound when exploring the work of Otto Peine in the early 1950's. The German Zero artists move me with their hammered points in grids of logic (I'm looking at you Günther Uecker) and the unsteadiness of the human hand. I cry when I see them - it's a love I cant explain, or a past life echo. Something I find really, really profound and a pull towards something amazing.

The use of certain patterning as a psychologically relaxing process is seen in the work of Yuyoi Kusama, a major influence, and certainly the modern master of the dot. The dot is also a motif seen across outsider art, from Mali to Bali from the most distant past and the most fast forward future. It speaks to the human desire to seek out and interpret patterns even where none may exist.

The repetition of naturally occurring patterns, such as the pulsar tracing made famous by the cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, created an obsession. In the work, I make similar lines in cadence, creating patterned effects that are unknown to the viewer until the entire image is revealed.

In the post-Internet, post-modern future we find ourselves in, the Albers' are always present in color work. Even they had predecessors working on tapestries of the Renaissance; all trying to understand how color works and how it makes us feel.

The ideas usually develop, and I will be haunted by it. I see that shape everywhere. I know I have to do it. I create a group of 20 pieces or so as a sketch. The community on Gansevoort Street of tourists, collectors, and every day people let me know which pieces connect deeply. I refine the image and the ideas. Always checking with the designers that I am working with or the collector that wants a certain color to develop organically. It will be there.

The people of New York City respond. They say, "Make Grey." I say, "Ok." So, I make Grey. It is wonderful and I am surprised, but I shouldn't be. Then they say, "A deep red Orange like the sunsets on Mars." I do that. It is amazing. Their clothes, their colors, their homes, their feelings come back in the paintings.

Hardcore since 1974, my first teacher was watching my parents, a painter and sculptor. Later, apprenticing under fine artists, I worked and attended thousands of craft and fine art shows. These provided hundreds of makers, fine artists, and craftspeople to observe and learn from. I have managed no less than 30 shows per year for the last 10 years and sold art all over the US and Australia to a worldwide group of collectors.

The Art Students League of NY was the first academic training I received, and where I earned a mechanical pencil I still draw with today. More in-depth study later at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts got me a

student loan and a serious sculpture habit.

Today, I support my sculpture with a beautiful line of paintings and a residency program called the Mansion. At the Mansion, I create a positive active space for people to learn the trade of being artists in a genuine 1893 Victorian mansion. My main studio is The Temple, a secret lair that is 20,000 sf of vintage 1933 valve factory,

untouched since the 1980s.