Kathleen King - Statement 2007

I find my deepest being scarred and twisted by encounters with society and power. At the same time I experience moments of ecstasy and freedom that compel and renew me. Through the action of painting, landscapes of personal fragmentation and a simultaneous search for wholeness are charted. As I explore contemporary paradoxes, my work evokes a frisson--an ecstatic moment combining joy and fear.

Spontaneity and improvisation are the basis of my process. Jazz composer Bill Evans has defined the discipline of  improvisation as "that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with (the artist's) hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere." Recent paintings extend a vocabulary of abstract markmaking that I have been developing for about five years. The imagery is composed of tangled line, eccentric shape, calligraphic gesture, and emotional/oppositional color. As layers of marks accrue, they interweave, overlap or obscure each other. Elements seem to rise, spin, float and fall in mysterious and unexpected combinations. An intuitive overall pattern is woven, creating an engaged immediacy. Asymmetrically placed aggregations energize the pictures with a syncopation that moves the eye through an expanding and contracting space. Complexity is an aspect of the content, encouraging the viewer to lose themselves in the experience.

I make paintings that the viewer can interact with and reflect upon. My hope is that people will find something in my  work congruent with their own being that encourages them to keep exploring and telling their own truth. "There will always be a human need for a separate, seemingly sacred space--if only in the metaphorical form of art--in which one can find sanctuary from the swindle of the world, as Adorno called it, and recover a sense of what it means to be, in all one's uniqueness, " says Donald Kuspit. To reach for and nurture that sense seems like important work for artists in our time.