IPaintMyMind Exclusive: Sonny Kay Talks to Katie Metz

Disenchanted almost immediately with cracks in the sidewalk, Katie soon turned her attention to windows. With hundreds of thousands of them looming ominously amid the Puget Sound fog of downtown Seattle, there was no shortage of inspiration. “I was mesmerized by buildings and windows”, she says in retrospect. The collaged photographs soon gave way to a renewed passion for paint and before long she’d amassed enough work for a show, 2008’s City Series. Gestural, almost abstract (though still recognizable) representations, these works captured the essence of the soggy day-to-day existence in the Emerald City. “They were exactly what it felt like (at the time)”, says Katie. All sixteen pieces she hung sold within three weeks. The follow-up show, Downtown Series (2010), saw her fully embrace her passion for the high rise. It’s hard to imagine paintings of a specific urban landscape with a bigger commitment to capturing the essence of that place. Katie’s work quickly developed into an impassioned homage to the clutter and chaos of the modern metropolis, a love letter in skittish acrylic. 2011’s City Darshan series ventured even further into abstraction, a collection of visual meditations in which her employment of an exaggerated perspective and a playful grid structure became more evident. Concrete and Light carries these ideas to their logical conclusions. She hints that perhaps now might be a good time to switch gears. “I don’t know where things are headed in the next five years”, she says. “Sometimes I just like to paint… whatever”.

These days, Katie’s still taking photos constantly, though she is quick to point out that her skills are modest. “I don’t consider myself a photographer” she says, “I’ll print out a picture and paste it to the wall of my studio. Sometimes it’s the complete foundation (for a composition), but not always. I’m not trying to be completely accurate. The hard part is letting-go. I want to tie it together and make a feeling. It’s about trying to capture the essence of a moment or a situation”. She’s concerned with her work being “too illustrated”. “I don’t like 100% abstraction and I don’t like 100% illustration”, pausing only briefly before quoting the English poet, David Whyte. “The middle barely exists”, says Katie, contemplating momentarily the conundrum by which her creativity charts its course. Which isn’t to say that things are necessarily any clearer or easier now than they have been.

Life for Katie Metz, as for everyone, is a work in progress. The customary existential questions which occur to anyone passing the 40-year mark have, naturally, raised their heads. “Sometimes”, she continues, “I understand why people give up. There are days when I get that”. 

Fortunately for us, however, that sentiment is short-lived. “But, then I realize… There’s way more to see and understand.”

For more information and many more examples of Katie’s work, go to www.katiemetzstudio.com