Early this week I heard from my publisher, Guillemot Press:the poet and writer David Harsent had been in touch with them about my painting. I was so honoured when David agreed to write a short passage about my work. Here it is:
Kate Walters’ startling images go straight from the eye to whatever emotional nexus it is that primes and enriches our inner lives. Their visionary quality is evident in both form and impulse; they are compelling for what seems a wholly instinctive fusion of the visceral with the lyrical. And they are confrontational, presenting as encounters from dream just as dream relates to those deep quotidian mysteries to which we are most often blind.
David Harsent
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Here are some thoughts from my notebook about this week’s time in my studio:
She’s suddenly become very small – what does this mean? I want to ask you. Am I shrinking myself to fit my skin over the body of Little Kate?
I turn to you. I always turn to you.
Golden deer coiled like the morning sun pours himself over the lovers.
For long minutes I can sit and think of you. I want you to be happy. The nature of my love has changed. I think of how you touch the air around me in my paintings.
The Madonna carries/shelters the people under her arms, under her cape. In the painting the inner person – little me – is assimilated/absorbed/ and held within my body/heart cavity. I think of San Sepulchro, and a hot summer day. Of the painting of the Resurrection, how moved I was to behold it. And a roof terrace, and dust, and red ochre tiles. Of waiting for a bus beneath shady blue avenues of trees. Always Italy, my love.
Of the connection between nipples and stars. The little girl, her flat chest, her nipples open wide as eyes, in blue and gold.
I read about the personal belongings of gods furnishing our worlds, in Alchemical Psychology by James Hillman (p. 189).
I dream of being in Orkney, with a man, and a car which is pinky-orange, and it has no brake lights or reversing lights; the spaces where they would have been are smoothed over. I read Paradiso before I go to sleep.
I’ve been thinking about my survival house, how it’s open, and also tied to the earth by red cords. I’ve been dropped in slow motion, the cords are to keep me from bouncing up too high, to the land of no return.
Today as I drove to the studio I could feel your eyes in my belly.
There’s a curled baby; your phallus rests against her back; there’s an opening between my third eye and my crown, it drew itself, another birthing place.
You are midwife, lover, friend. What is the word for a male midwife? You hold my emerging crown so gently, I can feel your hands guiding my head, gently twisting my shoulders as I emerge.
My whole body smiles.
In another painting the flowers in your hands are also stars, they’re cold to the touch and soundless.
I listen to Sufi music, I read about The Unique Necklace and The Great Book of Songs.
Here is a painting made with closed eyes about the baby crawling towards her mother, from the father.
