Kate Flückinger Petty

Kate (Flückinger) Petty is a process-driven expressionistic oil painter. She finds inspiration in the beauty of the natural world - in cycles of life, organic matter and processes morphing and dissolving - and in cycles of love and loss - colors of decay commingling - emotional environments, moments, entanglements - and in intersections of grief and gratitude. Through abstracted forms, landscapes, flora, fauna, and figures, she strives to convey a kind of meaningful chaos, moxie, temporality, reverie, eternality.

I paint to see, to observe outside and within, to contemplate, to be.

I experiment with color, forms, nonforms, brushwork, layering, text, scraping and scratching, to actively participate, using symbols, moods, moments, emotion.

Color is my muse, as are untamed things: growing, moving, changing, forming, and falling apart - processes in life and the unseen - and structures, lines, and containment, boundaries, fleeting and illusory - the liminal, the ambiguous.

Liminality speaks to a spaciousness and muddied between - hazy, fuzzy, hidden, unclear, amorphous, blurred, buried, emergent - like waking from a dream.

My work moves between abstraction, figuration, landscape, and nothingness.

I honor the Dionysian spirit of chthonic transition, dissolution, dismemberment, re membering, regeneration - and moss, bark, mud, roots, petals, skin, sky, water.

I was born in Seattle, where I currently reside, though I grew up outside the city, at the edge of the county, an undefined space, between towns, almost rural yet not suburban environment. My first friends were the tall douglas fir trees standing like guardians around our house above a lake. Just like today, I was moved by music, movement, water, light, colors, landscapes shifting, and making things.

Other treasured works include a lifelong study and practice of ancient astrology — and volunteering in a state women’s prison since 2007 where I provide confidential nonjudgmental listening and emotional support to incarcerated folks.

Painting has always been a transformational practice for me, especially in times of upheaval and change. It offers a way to metabolize experiences and enter into relationship with something larger, broader, deeper than myself, and remember.

During covid I collected a percentage of sales from new works to support programs benefiting children of incarcerated moms. See that project here.
In 2024, I created, founded, and facilitated a new painting project in the prison called Painting Inside Out. May of 2025, I founded INANNA INSTITUTE.