We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kate Patrick a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Kate, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?
It can feel incredibly vulnerable to share your art with the world, yet there is such powerful intimacy shared when others connect with that vulnerability. When we normalize open heartedness, we create a safe space for community healing. At art shows and in person events, I am so inspired by the reactions of others, to hear how deeply they connect with my art. It is delightfully humbling to simply be myself and share it with the world, while in turn encouraging others to do the same. To earn a living as a full time artist is a privilege that requires a holistic system of support. Not only must an artist devote their life to developing artistic skill, they must also build a mycelial network of stability including wholesale relationships, pop-up markets, online sales and the ever precarious social media abyss.
Kate, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
As a lifelong creative inspired by the forests of the Pacific Northwest, I’ve always known that I would find a way to survive as an artist, At first, this meant oppressing my creativity within the machine of advertising and graphic design for over a decade. Thankfully this did allow opportunities to develop my sticker design skills, as I worked for a company that does vehicle graphics and boat wraps. To this day I still print my vinyl stickers with the same local business. Of course I desired an outlet for my repressed creative passions, so over many years I slowly created my own art business before going full-time in late 2019. What timing to commit to an artist’s inconsistent income!
Combining vibrant visuals with positive affirmations, I create nature inspired watercolors while surrounded by the forests of Mt Hood. When hiking with my sketchbook, my illustrations begin as a pencil sketch inspired by local flora + fauna + fungi, later outlined with pen and ink, then awakened with several washed of watercolor. Many of my pigments are collected from local clay soils and wild mushrooms such as inky caps and dyers polypore, while growing my own mushrooms for reference photos infuses a deeper connection with the land. I then turn my illustrations into functional sticker art, hand printed clothing and thoughtful stationary as a colorful reminder to take care of ourselves + each other.
Creativity is our power to enact change. A small sticker may seem like a little thing, but creating accessible art that we interact with everyday can inspire transformation.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
If I have to manifest that shit as an artist in our capitalist society, I want to create art that encourages a more compassionate world. To serve as a visual reminder that we are all connected, to the land, to nature, to one another. It’s why I create functional sticker art, to carry inspirational messages from the forest into our everyday lives. Amongst the forest floor we can learn how flora, fauna + fungi work together to reshape our world, nurture our future, and heal our minds. Our world is complicated enough, the least we can do is be f*cking nice to each other.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
As I am writing this, I am rent asunder by the destruction of my backyard forest on Mt Hood, Oregon. The same forest that guides my inspiration and translation into line work and pigment on paper. A new neighbor has begun the grievous process of ripping out trees that belong to bats, trenching dirt from wetland ponds filled with salamanders, and annihilating ephemeral plants that have grown here for longer than we have been alive. When confronted by numerous neighbors attempting to protect our community forest, he declared that this ain’t no liberal country and he can do what he wants, then proceeded to channel his frustration by eviscerating an entire section of forest and dumping trash to mark boundaries. I wake up each morning with a view of devastated trilliums, ferns and alder trees and a heartsick concern of helplessness. We have reached out to several state departments, wildlife protection agencies and watershed councils, with no reply thus far. Humanity is meant to act as caretaker, and I believe it will take a concerted community effort to protect these lands from ourselves. The eternally resilient forest is a multifaceted organism that will regrow with time, and I still find inspiration in this sentiment. As the mushroom queendom shows us, death and decay aren’t inherently evil, but rather a force of change, of renewal.
Contact Info:
- Website: craftedfromscratch.square.site
- Instagram: @craftedfromscratch
- Facebook: facebook.com/craftedfromscratchpdx
- Other: Faire Wholesale : faire.com/direct/craftedfromscratch