Katie Thomas Artist

Forward from Katie Thomas Master of Fine Arts catalogue
by Andrew Paul Wood

“The visual arts render visible forces that are themselves invisible.” 1

It was often said of abstract painting, to the point that it almost became a cliché of the art schools that it was all about “push” and “pull”. Imagine then the pictorial plane as a sort of rubber sheet, rather like the way Albert Einstein conceived of space-time, stretched and pushed by tensors and gravitational forces, which in a painting consist of colour and form rather than the gravity wells of suns and planets. Now imagine magnifying that medium down to the near-quantum level, only to find that the whole universe has been knitted out of superstring cosmic wool into one of Vivian Westwood’s infamous “unravelling sweaters” of the late 1970s, and you will have some idea of the painterly retinal engine that drives the pulses of a Katie Thomas painting.
This is not to suggest a stereotypical thematically feminine quality to the art; it transcends simple gender associations in the best traditions of formal abstract painting. It is archetypal. There is also something fundamentally biological about these compositions, like the fine cellular structure of algae or skin viewed through Georgia O’Keefe’s electron microscope. In all readings of these paintings we have the impression of a revelation as to the true nature of the architecture of life, or the universe, or everything and anything. Visual layers are peeled back like translucent onion skins of rhizomatic matrix code that subtly shift in perception and thus prevent the surface being read as a ground, though there are clear affinities with drawing and line.  At every juncture the painting insists on surprising the observer, defeating expectations and assumptions about how the whole gestalt interconnects.
When viewed at a different angle, the patterns evoke the geometric ripples denoting the surfaces of David Hockney’s turquoise Californian swimming pools, the silver crisscrossing slime trails of snails in the moonlight, pullulating nebulae, and Monet’s water lilies floating in space at Giverny. Is it the fine tracery of veins on the orb of an eye, or the delicate lattice of cracks and fissures on one of Jupiter’s frozen ice moons. It bops along like improvised jazz: free and spontaneous, but utterly rational and assured. It animatedly swirls in the invisible eddies and currents of its self-generated visual maelstrom. Is it lace? Is it sea foam? There is a dynamism that faintly intimates Vorticism. This is lively work, not something that lies there static and dead on the canvas. It writhes, roils, and seethes. It is pliant and elastic, but unbreakably strong despite its apparent frail and insubstantial nature.
Loose knitted stitches become a formalist metaphor for the tensions and slackenings in an illusory pictorial plane. Mondrian’s abstract grids owe their grave beauty to his entirely empirical trees. Kandinsky’s abstract forms started out as the onion domes of Mother Russia. Closer to home, Gordon Walters adopted a stylised koru and Allen Maddox’s slashing ‘X’s became the framework for specific artistic visions as much as excuses to get paint down on canvas. In Thomas’ case, it is knitting that provides the underlying compositional optical structure drawing the painting together, layered up to suggest volume and texture, and an almost living, or perhaps musical, vibration. One recalls that it was the random and asymmetrical geometry of patchwork quilts that led Sonia Delaunay to her bold abstract style.2   Thomas first exploited the stitch motif in her jewel like resin wall sculptures, but now translated into the fluid and expressive gestures of paint.
These woven meshes in a delicate rococo pastoral spectrum: mauve, pink, purple, peach, grey, and green, redefine painterly space in which horizontal and vertical forces continually form and reform into vibrating non-perspectival grids loosened from the rigidity of their moorings. The palette seems to an almost musical sensibility of harmony, counterpoint, rhythm and phrasing. Painted threads, the warp and weft, move across and against each other, utterly consistent, suggesting an impression of volumes rather than articulating them in a more concrete sense. The effect is rather like the finely layered drizzled webs of paint in Jackson Pollock’s Action Paintings, but obviously far more deliberately structured, linear, discrete and geometric, echoing Willem de Kooning’s senile, but pathetically beautiful (if of dubious authenticity) late paintings, but without the patina of melancholy or robotically going through the motions – this is very much a living beginning, not a dying end. It is an amniotic sea of potentials and opportunities.
Kaleidoscopic compositions, simultaneously flat and densely layered, hint at a knowable, holistic unity of structure that is, in reality, an opaque, unclassifiable and ungraspable maze that our perceptions can never entirely give order to, to which the viewer is ever estranged and outside. Is this, then, the thread which Ariadne gifted Theseus to lead him through King Minos’ labyrinth to the Minotaur? Is a similar serpentine allusion at play to that found in the striking brocade twisting with never repeating loops and twists in Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones’ exquisite work Sidonia von Bork (1860, Tate Gallery, London) – a twisting, treacherous and uncertain trajectory, or the net which catches the unwary eye? Is it an amoebic and protean sieve to sort and filter our sensory data, or a tousled vortex of the artist’s thoughts and impressions? Some strange fungus, or a creature of the fathomless interior altitudes of the sea?
The ambiguity of form and pictorial space disrupt easy or overly simplistic reading, forcing the viewer’s gaze into a careful saccade over the entire surface, leading the eye around more or less evenly to every new node of paint or unique intersecting knot of lines in the strongly tactile presence of the surface and the visceral texture (despite its relative thinness) of the paint.  This calls attention to the structure of the painting and thereby emphasises its nature as a single, integrated and self-contained object rather than an image.          
If anything, this loose, organic sensibility suggests the kind of painterly abstraction associated with the Tachisme movement in painting that developed in Paris in the 1940s, signalling French existentialism’s individual subjectivity and an awareness of the act of making. Thomas’ compositions similarly reject the burden of history painting in favour of this light, graceful physicality of paint in a way that is almost certainly tied in to her personal spiritual nature.
This is technically skilful, energetic, visually intelligent painting that fully exploits the possibilities of the painterly act, hovering between the figurative and non-objective, the suggestive, subtle, otherworldly and the absolute. The touch is mature, assertive and entirely confident, demonstrating a hard won competence in colour, line and form, and the assuredness of someone who has already accumulated a significant practice, but is open to the process of evolution, change and development not content to remain still. The mind continues to learn and to experiment with the possibilities of brushstroke and pigment within certain intuitive strictures and parameters. It does not stop here, and we can only begin to vainly imagine where it may go next as these painted skeins and strands unravel and reweave in future.

 1. Gilles Deleuze (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (trns. D.W. Smith), Minneapolis, p48.
 2. Maiten Bouisset (1969) in (ed) Jacques Damase (1991), Sonia Delaunay : Fashion and Fabrics, London.

Katie Thomas Master of Fine Arts catalogue 
Published in 2011 by Paeonia Publishing
Photography and publication design by John Newcombe
Copyright © Katie Thomas 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN  978-0-473-18437-7