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Biography |
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Biography |
"Katy Widger is a talented and thoughtful artist who weaves mythology and meaning into her nature inspired creations. Her work speaks about the natural world in a high-spirited poetic language." Wesley Pulkka - Art Critic, Albuquerque Journal, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
After more than 20 years in mixed-media fiber art, Katy took a sabbatical from the medium in 2003 and began painting in oils. This was a natural progression in her relentless search to put color on white cloth and canvas in ways that more clearly evoke the images and emotions she desires to express through the process of making her art. In oil painting, she has found a welcome freedom from the inherent constraints of fiber art. With this newly released creativity, her diverse experience and masterful use of color and composition has translated into intriguing and mesmerizing still life and representational oil paintings. Influenced by the works of Chardin, Monet, and Cezanne, her newest works take on the depth of expression that only oils allow. Taking inspiration from the visual and spiritual realm, Katy finds meaning and beauty in the ordinary and often overlooked simplicity of nature.
Although she ascended quickly to the top of the art-quilt/fiber-art world community, her most recent works in fiber began taking on ever-increasing representational theme. Even though her fiber work is still widely exhibited and internationally known and collected, with patrons throughout the United States and Europe, she has successfully made the leap into oil painting, thanks in part to her vast knowledge of color theory and experience in textural/color interplay in composition. Much of her knowledge is self-learned, but she focused her collegiate studies on color and design while a Fine Arts Major at San Juan College in Farmington, NM. During this period her work quickly became known for its rich intuitive color, her ability to harmonize diverse textures and shapes, and for its superb craftsmanship. She became a master in the art of hand-dyeing fabric, and has shared her knowledge and experience with thousands in her books, The New Color Wheel Fabric Dyeing and Print Your Own Fabric.
She owes her artistic heritage to her ancestral roots, having descended from historical Texas and New Mexico pioneers, including the trail-blazing cowboy Charlie Goodnight, one of the first cattlemen to move west across Texas to settle the frontier. A fourth-generation New Mexican, that same pioneering spirit runs deeply in her veins, as she became one of the first to take her great grandmother's craft of quilting and turn it into a new fiber-art form. Her heritage is one of pure Americana, a mixture of Irish and Cherokee bloodlines which records hardship and struggle, and yet a stern determination to prevail.
Katy was raised in the small rural village of Corrales, north of Albuquerque, and has lived and loved New Mexico for all but a very few months of her life. She shares her Edgewood studio with her husband Ken, three very talkative and opinionated parrots, and her poodle.
"My studio looks out over a beautiful valley with views of the Sandia, Manzano and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges... The wild and untamed is within arm's reach on a daily basis. And the sky! Deep cerulean blue like a huge inverted bowl. In the evenings, God paints a sunset new every day that stretches across the entire horizon; like oils loosed on an immense canvas. The warm, saturated colors that appear every evening off my back porch show up in every facet of my work. " Katy Widger
