b. 1976
on unceded ancestral lands of Duwamish and Coast Salish people
Kate Flückinger (Petty) is a process-driven expressionistic oil painter. She finds inspiration in the beauty of the natural world and in cycles of life: organic matter and processes morphing and dissolving, and in cycles of love and loss: with colors of decay intersecting and reflecting emotional environments, moments and entanglements. She strives to convey a kind of meaningful chaos, moxie, reverie, presence and eternality.
I paint to see. To meditate, to be. To experiment with color, forms, nonforms, brushwork, layering, text. To actively participate with symbols, moods, moments.
Color is a primary muse, as are untamed things - growing, moving, changing, forming, falling apart - processes in life and cycles and the unseen - structures, lines, boundaries, containment - fleeting or illusory - the liminal and ambiguous.
Liminality speaks to spaciousness, a muddied between - fuzzy, hazy, hidden, unclear, amorphous, blurred, buried, near emergent - like waking from a dream.
Through abstracted forms, landscapes, flora, fauna, and figures - I seek to enter, depart, describe, live in, leave, and return to fluid transient transpersonal spaces.
I was born in Seattle where I currently reside, though I grew up outside the city at the edge of a county, between towns, in a somewhat rural yet not quite suburban, undefined environment -liminal from the start. My first friends were tall douglas fir trees standing like guardians around our house above a lake. Just like today, I was moved by music, movement, water, light, color, the landscape, and creating.
Other treasured work includes a lifelong study and practice of ancient astrology — and volunteering in the state women’s prison, since 2007, where I provide confidential listening and emotional support to incarcerated people.
Painting, making, creating have been an anchor for me throughout my life: a transformational practice to navigate change and grief. During covid I collected a percentage of sales from new work to support programs benefiting children of incarcerated moms. See that project here. In 2024 I created, founded, facilitated a new painting project/program in the prison called PAINTING INSIDE OUT.