Kate Mueller
Kate Mueller has made art all her life, with frequent and sometimes lengthy hiatuses. In her early to mid-twenties, she lived in New York City where she did large surreal oil paintings in her Manhattan loft. Starting in her late twenties, after a move to Vermont, she began working in pastel. For about fifteen years, Mueller worked exclusively from the figure, eventually expanding into portraits and landscapes, in both pastel and oil. She works nearly always from life, from models and plein air. During the pandemic, she returned to oil, creating abstract paintings incorporating biomorphic shapes.
Mueller studied at Goddard College, Vermont, with Anci Bozena Slovak and James Gahagan and took classes at the Art Students League, in New York, with Morton Kaish and Gabriel Laderman. For years she attended, on and off, the Thursday night art group in Montpelier, mentored by the late Billy Brauer. She has exhibited throughout Vermont, including the Governor’s Corridor, the Vermont Arts Council, both in Montpelier, and Art in the Round Barn, Waitsfield. She was a featured artist at the Chaffee Art Center, Rutland, and has had solo exhibits at Dibden Gallery (now Julian Scott Memorial Gallery), Johnson State College (now Northern Vermont University), and Christine Price Gallery, Castleton University, among other places. Her work is held privately, both nationally and internationally.
Artist’s Statement
I have a certain impatience with artists’ statements. I’m a writer as well as a visual artist, so I appreciate the power of words. But though words can inform and direct, they can also be a distracting window dressing. If your mode is visual then the visual should deliver. That being said, I do have some wordy reflections about my art.
Though I consider myself to be quite political, I don’t see my art as an arena for that, per se. My art has to do with some visceral pulse or rhythm, and if perchance what I produce becomes political, so be it, but I don’t go there intentionally.
Visual art is all about seeing, a sense, and so is in its essence, its essentiality, a sensual experience. Color and form and something that engages eye and brain, gut and groin. I can’t get away from that basic experience nor do I want to. Rather, I relish it. I happen to like faces and bodies and trees. But sometimes I think it really doesn’t matter what the subject is. It could be flowers in a vase. Litter in a gutter. A flayed rabbit. A forest on fire. I see each piece as a snapshot of some bigger matrix, a fragment of the all.
When I work in the studio, I find it difficult to determine when a piece is finished. The painting or pastel keeps changing on me—shapes become more simplified than more complex, colors keep shifting. Deciding when to stop can seem almost arbitrary—sometimes more a point of exhaustion than some big aha moment. Sitting in my studio, surrounded by various pieces-in-progress, their colors and curves start to connect and flow into one another, and I feel as if I’m working on one big painting, with each individual piece a brief surfacing, one focused moment of expression. Underneath is some big shape-shifting feeling, a giant refracting fractal of color and shape. I tune into a rhythm and deliver on the page a fragment of that big fractal, and as a fragment, something of the whole may be inherent in it. Or so the hope is.
