Description
ARTIST STATEMENT
For me, painting is the purest form of thought.
I rarely begin with a fully formed idea. A painting may begin with a photograph, a memory, a feeling, or someone I know, but I am not interested in recreating an image. I think with paint. Through color, gesture, and layering, I work through ideas and states of being that cannot be fully understood in advance. If I try to impose meaning too early, the work resists. I have learned to trust the painting to reveal what I could not know before I began.
My work centers on the women closest to me—myself, my daughter, my mother, and my sister. These figures become a way of returning to questions of lineage, care, grief, and the ways identity is continually shaped through relationship.
Painting demands a kind of attention that extends beyond seeing. It is an immersive practice where beauty and contradiction can exist simultaneously. Each painting is my attempt to remain with questions that cannot be resolved outside of paint.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Katie Fountain is a painter, writer, and occasional maker of sound works. She is currently an MFA candidate in the Low Residency program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she also serves as a Teaching Assistant in Contemporary Practices. She earned her B.A. in Studio Art from Chicago State University and has exhibited her work at Woman Made Gallery, Beverly Art Center, Bridgeport Art Center, and Chicago State University.
Fountain lives in northwest Indiana with her two children, four cats, and two dogs, maintains a studio in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood, and spends her weekdays leading a cooperative grocery store. She suspects all of these pursuits have more in common than they first appear.
© Katie Fountain