I'm Katie Bliss

 

As I enter the final phase of life; all of my children grown, husbands dead, and more free time than I have ever been privilaged to have, the drive to create consumes me.  My work is more exploratory and less constrained, creating on all levels is an incredible release.  I consider not only my projects, but my life and home all works of creative expression dealing with grief, joy, change, life, aging, death, reflection, and the search for who I have become.

 

I was a child growing up in the turbulant 1960's and 70's; a witness to the protests for civil rights and against the Viet Nam War, the assasinations of the Kennedy's and Martin Luther King, and the corruption of the Nixon administration. My young pre-teen mind was anguished, confused and angry.  

 

The world made no sense to me; and then I discovered art. Art in its many forms literary, performative and visual, introduced me to methods of expression which I could understand and sometimes even relate. I was drawn to this world of  creative expression, not  so much as a writer, I tried poetry, or performer, I tried dance,  but as a visual artist, and it is profoundly satisfying for me.

 

I am excited by  artists that employ intense color, dynamic movement and unconventional form as expression. Pablo Picasso, Salvidor Dali and Henri Matisse were my earliest influences, and still resonate with me as rule breakers. ​​​

 

I took every art class offered during my public education and  used them as an opportunity to inform my new found passion.  I learned about the works of more and more artists and the wildly diverse forms of expression that were being used, breaking conventional rules with creative materials and powerful political statements. 

 

I was accepted at the University of Texas at Austin Art Department where I began to  pursue a BFA with a focus on fibers. After a couple of years,  life events  interupted my formal education; until the 1990's, when I finally earned my BFA  from Texas State University, with a focus on Painting and Drawing.

 

As a mother of five children in a challenging marriage, my work primarily reflected the home environment; family, chaos, pregnancy and general domestic dementia.

 

In pretty generic fashion, I got lost in the weeds of mid-life; busy with divorce, work, home, childrearing, remarriage, death . . . typical reasons that creative expression can lay dormant, but not dead.

 

Eventually, the weeds thinned and the seeds of my creativity began to re-emurge in spits and spurts; resulting in many small works in a wide variety of media. 

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I live west of Austin in the house I built in the Hill Country.

 

A new adventure of Bliss begins!