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. Through abstracted forms, landscapes, flora, fauna, and figures, she strives to convey a kind of meaningful chaos, moxie, reverie, quality of 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 my muse, as are untamed things: growing, moving, changing, forming, falling apart - processes in life and cycles and the unseen - and structures, lines, boundaries, containment, fleeting or illusory - the liminal and the ambiguous.
Liminality speaks to spaciousness, a muddied between - fuzzy, hazy, hidden, unclear, amorphous, blurred, buried, near emergent - like waking from a dream.
My work moves between abstraction, figuration, and landscape, especially landscapes of transition, dissolution, and emergence, and the organic language of the natural world: moss, bark, mud, roots, petals, skin, sky, water.
I was born in Seattle, where I currently reside, though I grew up outside of the city at the edge of the county, between towns, in a fairly rural and not quite suburban undefined environment. 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 has always been a transformational practice for me, especially in times of upheaval. It offers a way to metabolize experience and enter into relationship with something larger and deeper than myself.
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.