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 - in cycles of love and loss: with colors of decay commingling and reflecting emotional environments, moments, and entanglements - and in the intersection of grief and gratitude. Through abstracted forms, landscapes, flora, fauna, and figures, Kate strives to convey a kind of meaningful chaos, moxie, reverie, a quality of being, temporality, and eternality.
I paint to see. To observe from outside and within. To contemplate. To be.
I experiment with color, forms, nonforms, brushwork, layering, text, scraping and scratching, to actively participate with symbols, moods, moments, emotion.
Color is my muse, as are untamed things: growing, moving, changing, forming, and falling apart - processes in life and the unseen - and structures, lines and containment, boundaries, fleeting or illusory - the liminal and the ambiguous.
Liminality speaks to spaciousness, a muddied between - hazy, fuzzy, hidden, unclear, amorphous, blurred, buried, emergent - like waking from a dream.
My work moves between abstraction, figuration, landscape, and nothingness.
I honor the Dionysian spirit of chthonic transition, dissolution, dismemberment, and regeneration - and the 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 yet 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 making things.
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 and grief. It offers a way to metabolize experiences and enter into relationship with something larger and deeper than myself.
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. In 2025 I co-founded INANNA INSTITUTE.