“I have always been drawn to paintings that have a certain sound, or song to them.”
Katie Trick’s painting reminds one of the work of Henri Matisse particularly the mid-century Cut Outs and the early 20th century interior views, namely in the simplicity and distillation of color and outline, the raw yet vibrant mark of the brush and pigment inscribed in paper. However, for her part, Trick’s work has as its source the world of the unconscious artistic process, unfurled across paper to create an instinctual and musical image.
In this, Trick is connected to the work of artists such as Rudolf Bauer for whom a lyrical abstraction seems a more fitting description. In fact, for Katie Trick making art seems a dance of forms. This is a symbiotic journey through which each new work or series draws from memory and experimentation of the work before: “From one painting or drawing to the next I gather shapes and colours. A certain kind of mark making will surface and bleed into the next piece, and so on. I’m constantly discovering something new. At times things come into sight whilst I’m drawing that may have appeared and been discarded in paintings a year ago, because at the moment, I didn’t quite know how to use it. It’s like I’m constantly grabbing and storing things in a mental archive.” This perhaps explains the presence of staccato like traces of forms, like music notes punctuating the surface. Indeed, Trick’s work has also been compared to the work of Paul Klee, and she notes she has become increasingly interested in the modernist master’s work, particularly the way in which music informs visual art practice. “The musicality of Klee is one the first things I was drawn to; it’s like I can hear the shapes and the colours. And they’re so joyful, so playful, and charming, at times magical.”
Katie Trick’s oeuvre includes oil, watercolor and oil pastel on paper, board and canvas and has an intimate scale of usually under sixty centimetres. A robust graphic appeal is achieved through cartographic surface intersected by abstracted geometric shapes, notations of form and references to landscape. This is achieved through a process of creating patterns, shapes and scraping away while creating “new paths.” The artist explains her process for one work, expressing her artistic approach in poetic terms: “In the end, was a landscape, of sorts, with hints of structures, or sweeping movements, I think I was trying to find something that resembles Port Talbot. The sea hits the land, where the steel works sit. Billowing, grey, sparkling at night, then the mountains begin, and the valleys. The lines appear as though they’ve been excavated within the process…. It was as though I was desperately trying to find this place within the painting.”
This artistic energy and movement is revealed in a sculptural sense of surface, representation framed and intersected by abstraction. For Katie Trick it is the process of playing with pigment, shapes and imagery that create new worlds and a sense of music and life. The artist has as such invented a new pictorial vocabulary evoking memory, music notated by geometric form.
Rosa JH Berland
