EROTICS OF POWER
“By removing the human from the figure, and starting with a single figuration born out of the shapes I find in mundane objects, I find something that feels body, internal, external, and moving and changing. Now they are beyond gender and there’s nothing but relationship. They are approaching each other, interacting, challenging, owning, feeling entitled, taking, trying.
“Almost always I paint about power and control. I am into the deep machinations and relational politics of my alien creatures - sensual manipulative beasts. They turn and dive, penetrate and flow, stream and wind around each other like eels. Never settling into the organic body or alien autopsy – they want to be beautiful, but end up uneasy and sometimes trembling. My creatures turn into each other and back into themselves. They are just bad with boundaries. Even a single creature may feel like a struggle for power and control, as if they are trying to both turn and flatten, trying to become one face, or another. They exist in all dimensions, orientations and timelines. My alien creatures exist outside of gender and only in relation of self-to-self and self-to-other. They are expressions of visceral monstrous envy, greed, succulence, desire, ache – our growling ego…"
'A thousand gates and the shadow of your blue eyes. (Sy)', Kate Howe, 2021, oil paint, oil paste and rapidograph pencil on canvas, 214 x 214 cm.
'You can’t just show up', Kate Howe, 2021, oil paint, oil pastel and rapidograph pencil on canvas, 214 x 214 cm.
'Up through the sieve of life with me. (Mariam)', Kate Howe, 2021, oil paint, oil pastel and rapidograph pencil on canvas, 214 x 214 cm.
'Tuck and roll, yo. (Peter)', Kate Howe, 2021, oil paint and oil pastel on canvas, 214 x 214 cm. (Right)
'Me and she (study for Tuck and Roll, yo)', Kate Howe, 2021, oil paint on canvas, 80 x 80 cm.
'Hard candy pulls my fillings out and makes my teeth sharp. But I love it', Kate Howe, 2021, oil paint and oil pastel on canvas, 120 x 180 cm.
'Sticky', Kate Howe, 2021, oil paint and rapidograph pencil on canvas, 214 x 214 cm.
'The further you float away the more I’m stuck to you', Kate Howe, 2021, oil paint and rapidograph pencil on canvas, 120 x 180 cm.
“But the world can’t only be dark or there’s nothing to fight for. And so I think about those steep, steep descents, the gooseflesh rising as I fly, I think about what it feels like to be totally and completely my own person. It was a long time coming, this freedom. It comes only in flashes, and every single flash I pay for in a pound of flesh, given or taken, but it’s worth it to effervesce.
My darkness is filled with color. And so I paint. I paint me. And when I’m done, it looks like it’s them, not me, this other, this thing, a betta fish in a crystal bowl with turquoise sand. Apt.
There has to be music. Every body of work has it, the driving hypnosis of the sound of my obsession. With this batch, it was Yosi Harikawa’s Wandering. This to me is the sound, the sound of me rising, the sound of me knowing, the sound of me having a right to beauty and breath and a right to live in the absence of fear.
It's a lot, isn’t it? How do we paint about that then? About violence against women, about women, about gender, about parity, about agency? How can I write when I can’t even talk about it? How then to paint about it? I know it’s a painting because my howling indignance is mute, I’m beyond words. That means it’s a painting, it’s gone beyond the explicable. So there’s a way.
One day, I twisted a tea towel in my lap, and then I looked at that knot, at those tight, converging lines and I felt like that. Tight.
I got up and began drawing. The forms exploded like my figure drawing always does, it enlarged itself until it filled the canvas while I followed it, helpless.
I felt I had made a form, a being, an alien, a fish, a frog, an unstable entity, much like we all are. Something that tries to be seen but morphs into something else. After the painting is finished, it is the detritus of my excavation, a creature in it’s own right, slinking off to charm, and fool, and take in yet another sucker.”
'Ren finds the Mothership', Kate Howe, 2021, oil paint and oil pastel on canvas, 214 x 214 cm. Studio Shot.
'Chill out, Slow down.' (After Titian), Kate Howe, 2021, oil paint and oil pastel on canvas, 200 x 200 cm. Studio Shot.
'Roll with me Baby (Martha)', Kate Howe, 2022, oil paint and oil pastel on canvas, 120 x 160 cm.
'The injury I must do them, if I like them, I must do privately.' (After Bacon’s Study of Lucian Freud), Kate Howe, 2021, oil paint and oil pastel on canvas, 214 x 214 cm.
'And do not saw the air with your hands too much, thus. Hmmm? (Hamlet to players)', Kate Howe, 2021, installation, oil paint, oil pastel, rapidograph pencil, copper wire, trickline, and stitching on linen, with plastic tarp pieces, dried leaves, logs and festoon lights, painting dimensions: 278 x 488 cm.
'She owed us so many poems', Kate Howe, 2021, oil paint and oil pastel on canvas, 200 x 200 cm.
'And that shock of knowing, it never left her', Kate Howe, 2021, oil paint, oil pastel and rapidograph pencil on canvas, with stitching, trickline and saffron cloth, 244 x 488 cm.
'Bacon in my Coffee', Kate Howe, 2021, oil paint and oil pastel on canvas. 80 x 80 cm.
“Sometimes even just the single creatures feel to me like a struggle for power and control, like they are trying to both turn and flatten like they are trying to become one face or another.
Their darkness is hidden in their toxic beauty, they fool us into coming close, but upon further reflection, their fleshy, hairy imbalance creeps and spills, they are heavy with need. They are needy in the extreme. They will consume each other as they glitter. Some people say these are self-portraits, and they are not wrong. Some people say they are beautiful, and to that I say, be careful in what you allow to seduce you.
I am one of these creatures, creeping up with a metal skillet in the dark. I am corseted into shape, propped up on heels. I am a metronome, hypnotizing you as I tumble inside. They are everything they should be but nothing I want to be. My alien creatures are molded internally and externally to fit all the conflicting social edicts of their position and have cracked under the pressure of duality, splintered into multiples.
Happy as a flatworm which is now two flatworms after the rusty blade of cruel curiosity slips through them, they spill new distractions, ribbons of flowing color propelling them to the next corrosive contact. They consume and subsume each other.
The paintings are large because in order not to see myself paint I have to fall inside. I am never afraid of a large empty canvas, it is a clear pool into which I gladly slip, naked in the dark, ripples in my wake as my bare feet touch the smooth stone below. Pieces of paper, small and fiddly, bound canvas I can hold in both hands, these things are so precious, so easily filled with one mark which accidentally means everything. I have, until now, needed a surface into which I can disappear.”
'which me will survive / all these liberations' (After a quote by Audre Lord from her poem "who said it was simple"), Kate Howe.
'She stretched langoriously, consuming me wholy in one bite. (aka the Operatic Hippopotamus)' Kate Howe.
'unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors' (title From ""A woman speaks"" by Audre Lorde), Kate Howe.
'Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments' (title From The Tempest, by Shakespeare, said by Caliban), Kate Howe.
'Suck up', Kate Howe.
'I am not one piece of myself (From a quote by Audre Lorde)', Kate Howe.
'Naked as paper to start. (title from The Applicant – Sylvia Plath)', Kate Howe.
'Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.' (title from The yellow wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman), Kate Howe.
'But baby, don't get it twisted.' (title from lyrics by Rihanna), Kate Howe.
'Just because its good doesn't mean its healthy', Kate Howe.
'The blushing Buddha of Shame and her lover', Kate Howe.
'Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day' (text From The yellow wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman), Kate Howe.
'I, being born a woman and distressed (title from work of the same name by Edna St. Vincent Millay)', Kate Howe.
'Didn't they tell you that I was a savage? (title from lyrics by Rhianna)', Kate Howe.
'Unfolded', Kate Howe.
'Now you are a broken seal: A scarlet stain upon the earth.' (title from Fragement of a poem by Sappho), Kate Howe.
'Lick', Kate Howe.
'engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation. kill off the emotional parts, and come with me. (title inspired by the writing of Bell Hooks)', Kate Howe.
“I don’t reach for beauty, the desire to be liked is just as ugly as complementary colors, and they fisure together. I find the tension in the color relationships, darkness to me is all that glitters.
I’ve never seen more beautiful rabid animals than at a Dennis Basso fur show at the Club on the top of Aspen Mountain.
I paint in purple, avocado, and chartreuse because my mother used those colors, and her practice and life are the scaffolding on which I crucified my sense of self once I knew I was a woman. I’m trying to talk about power. Power, control, hierarchy, agency, entitlement, subjugation, love, lust, loss, and ownership.
I’m trying to tell you what it’s like to be valued as a thing to be owned, tamed, conquered, to be an accessory, to be bought and sold.
We’ve all been in this relationship, one which leaves us proud, full of shame, bruised but dripping with longing. There is something seductive in the decisions we make, held down between two ugly choices, we slip through the gap and into a reality we convince ourselves is right. Sometimes we take a chunk of the other person with us in our escape.
Sometimes, we get away with it, emerge unscathed, and the thrill of having stood our ground is like the sun on skin, and time slows down and stretches out and we float and breathe before we are plunged back in again.”
- Kate Howe.