We’re excited to introduce our current featured artist in our Sew Generously Galleries. Karen Luke-Fildes, a Seattle-based artist. She has spent the last three decades dedicating her practice–using oil on canvas, to the awe of the natural splendor of the Pacific Northwest.

Interview

Could you explain a bit about who you are, your background and your practice? 

Luke-Fildes: I’m a woman, I’m a mother. I’m a human on a planet that groans for the safety of its cradle. I paint to keep my head on straight; I paint to keep my mind fierce. Art has always kept me out of trouble. I grew up in a household with mental diversity and spent my adulthood troubleshooting neuro divergence in my own family, and the gift that emerges from my story is that the remedies to treat illnesses that threaten mental health are to listen and to notice. 

“Painting is how I listen. It’s a noisy world, but there’s a chant that connects us all, a unifying rhythm that breaks through if we listen with wonder, without judgment. Nature is a cradle, and I find innocence there.“

Your process. How have you witnessed changes in your art practice over the span of your career? Has there ever been a turning point on any level that caused a change in how you create or process? 

Luke-Fildes: When your name is Karen during a privileged age where misuse of power brings out dominionism, it’s time to dare yourself to lay down the notion that you know anything. The problem with implicit bias is troubling to me. Faith based prejudice is being addressed in my current process. 

I’ve been practicing a “palimpsest” ritual. I paint what I think I see and after I sit with it, even become fond of it, I paint over it to let go of my notion- trying to see with a beginner’s mind. There are layers of painterly expressions that had begun to feel precious and important even, but I’m learning to let go of the previous story by smearing over new paint, with unrefined wisdom where there is childlike reverence for sacred northwest places. A palette knife spreads thick and a hog brush smears thin finding a new story. Sometimes covering the whole canvas with black is the only way to find a more honest light.”

Many of your works have had a unifying theme of water, specifically related to the Pacific-Northwest. Why water? 

“We are so often scattered and looking for a sense of belonging, but the water cycle shows us that we all belong to each other. We are made of water. We live on a rare planet where water abounds. It feels like a loving thing, to see each of us as a drop in this miraculous cycle.”  

Keeping watch by the cradle of the earth awakens in me how much strength it takes to be a mother, a woman. How we want to hold all that needs to be held. How much more needs holding. The estuary teaches us everything about holding – the tangled mucky dead grasses hold water as a cradle for the new little living things  – the lifting water molecules rise to greet the morning. The storms push and pull but the drops continue to rise and fall in their cycle. This is a comfort to me.

Technology, and especially social media has made it easier than ever to connect with artists globally. There is still a value of in-person connection though. What is your way of being connected to artists and art communities? 

Luke-Fildes: I am able to find a more genuine connection with clients during the commission process. This allows me to meet with my patron one on one, whether through zoom or in person as I practice listening. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by technology and the changes brought to artists with AI, a new form of trust is found for me with one muse at a time. I pretend each person is a drop of water in the cycle, and try to place them in a setting where light and contours interplay. We find a sense of place together. It feels like childhood again, meeting new friends and letting them imprint the process as if it is theirs.  

Art is curious in a human way. My patron system has brought me lifetime friends. I call them my “Minibeasts” because a treasure found hidden in a human being may seem little but look out, because a sweet teeny truth has more bite than a big fat ugly scary lie.

Any pieces you are currently working on or recent projects you’re excited to share? 

Luke-Fildes: I’m compiling paintings and poems celebrating the entire water cycle as an audio visual meditation. The newer works that have completed the cycle include toilets and drains, our humanness – our shared legacy of waste. 

While looking for evidence of restoration, I’ve become a skeptical optimist portraying our shared mascots of renewal. A proclamation that we all sh€t – and when we accept our humanness, we are moved to agree. To care for the sacred legacy of our shared resources.

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