/ by Tasha L. Harrison
/ photography by Latoya Dixon Smith
If you’re looking for the abstract artist known as Katie Walker on social media, you’ll find her work, but not the artist herself. With dozens of articles and features in several galleries such as Blue Spiral1, Sandler Houston, as well as Art & Light with her work on display, you almost expect to find an Instagram account chronicling the artist’s process day to day.
Walker, with her bright, kinetic personality seems to be exactly the sort who would win the internet, but it’s just not her thing. “It’s not that I don’t want to do it. It’s just that I don’t want people up in my art,” she says.
A refreshing mindset, but one that is in total contradiction to how many artists manage their careers nowadays. As a writer, my own timeline is often filled with “behind the scenes” content that feed the beast that constantly demands evidence of what it takes to create anything beautiful. That desire to pull back the curtain to see the wizard is basic human curiosity, but it’s just as human to want to be alone in the process.
By no means does Walker create in a vacuum. Her studio is at Artbomb in Greenville’s West Village. There she is surrounded by fellow artists that encourage and inspire her, but this is only one part of a life that she’s fashioned that makes creativity something she lives and breathes. Inspiration is not something Walker waits for, it’s something she lives.
An unplugged creative life definitely has its benefits. Walker came into her talent during a time when art was more analog than digital and with the support of local galleries, she’s been able to create without influence, something that solidified her style. The only feedback she receives is when the work is complete.
“You created this art? I thought the artist was a man,” is one of the most memorable reactions Walker can recall someone having to her work.
She’s not entirely sure what the reaction meant but has decided that it was in regard to the size of the paintings. She regularly creates paintings as large as ten to twelve feet in size. “I’ve always preferred to create larger works,” Walker says. “I like the physicality of it.
Walker stretches her own canvases, mixes her own acrylic paint and with her work spread all over the floor, it’s easy to see that her process is interactive. A finished piece commands and alters space, but mostly she likes the hands-on, full body nature of creating large works.
In the controlled chaos of her studio Walker keeps sketchpads filled with sketches, lists of words that she likes, and lines that sound like poetry which could become the titles of her work. “Because my work is so abstract, people don’t often connect the title to the image,” she says.
Titles range from recipes to thoughts on trying times in her life to diagrams of weather patterns in the garden. Walker’s garden is a big inspiration which feels quintessentially Southern in a way you wouldn’t expect from an abstract artist.
Walker’s titling process and the diagrams of her work are fascinating. It’s a peek into the mind of a multi-passionate artist that has harnessed everything she loves to create. More often than not, it will start with a memory of a place that she’s been or places that have become important to her. Some even start from a drawing of a map.
“I’m reluctant to say that I create maps, but these are the maps of my life,” Walker says.
In a way, everyone’s work is a map. A documentation of the feelings, places, things and people that you meet along the way. Blending those experiences with the knowledge that Walker has gathered, creates an intuitive interpretation of her view of the world.
Finding Katie Walker
When you’re not on social media, it takes a bit of research to interact with an artist such as painter Katie Walker.
Walker maintains a studio at Art Bomb in the Village of West Greenville. Upstairs and light-filled through casement windows, it sits alongside Diane Kilgore Condon’s own studio, quite a pair they make, a duo of women artists painting on a larger-than-life scale.
You can buy directly from Walker at Art Bomb’s annual sale or from one of several esteemed galleries that represent her, Blue Spiral 1 in downtown Asheville, Sandler Houston Gallery in midtown Atlanta and Art & Light Gallery in Greenville, on Aiken St.
A large, finished work, in acrylic, titled Allegiance, hangs in Katie Walker’s painting studio at ArtBomb in the Village of West Greenville. Her titling process is complex and varied with some paintings receiving a single word while others, such as the rectangular one here, are conferred with much more: I raised my glass to all the pin-striped suits he’ll never wear.
