I am fascinated by the pregnant moment of shift and change when events suddenly stop being the same and become in flux. In my paintings I work with imagery inversion, flipping horizontal and vertical imagery and process to capture a pause in momentum, working toward a sense of simultaneous uncertainty verging on collapse and stability.
There is a pregnant gap bridging any two states--from rest to action and from contemplation to completion. Between is an ongoing series of works acting as a study of this gap. These process heavy works are focused on concluding as disoriented, dissonant and unfixed.
One of my ongoing fascinations is with wind. Growing up in Tennessee, I was fascinated with the way I could track a gust of wind through the tree-canopies overhead, just by listening. I could see those trees swaying 10 feet or more in one direction or another…but I could also hear the wood. Trees that big creak and moan when they bend.
Though my artworks have taken many turns, stylistically and in media, the wild weather I experienced under those tree canopies has always informed my work. I think more broadly now, considering my adopted Southern Californian landscape and climate while looking at the larger global climate-influenced landscapes I see virtually.
In the last year I started looking at dust devils and up-drafts. They are a real-time indicator of global warming. They occur when the ground is hotter than the air around it. It can cause a real-time funnel, pulling air up, rather than dropping down from the clouds like a tornado. The hotter the planet gets, the bigger the dust devils and updrafts.
The Primal Elements individually, and as a grouping, shaped these works. Though abstracted, each work nods to an element through color, application, and imagery. Earth: mostly neutral colors clashing with the neons found nature. Air: Slashed line-work pushing forward, cool colors branching out from the core of paintings, pulsing wind. Fire: Heated colors and jagged line work are paired to speak of the unexpected intensity of a roasting warmth. Water: Iridescence acrylic pours flood and spill over the works, ebbing or flowing. Each work is built with reverence to the nature.
Huge and Large Works- Katie Stubblefield- Fall 2025
Abstraction can be chancy business. The road from an initial idea to a completed work is uncertain and full of hazards. These works push that impulse, playing pours and stains off silhouetted hard-edged imagery.
This imagery is directly pulled from publicly distributed visuals coming from battlefields over the last several years. Photographic footage from drones and from the perspective of foot soldiers are applied and distorted to create lopsided disorientation, subverting gravity.
These are meant to be a bit painful to look at, pushing high and low values and dissonant color combinations to create a retinal dissonance, not dissimilar to the visual washout caused by flash bulbs. Bombs bursting in real time.
Sometimes I need to paint the “after.” In High Street, the attack is over, and all that is left is fractal shale—dangling, barely holding.
These studies are based on photographs and videos of updrafts and dust devils. They are my way of rolling around ideas before I make larger, more complicated works. Small works are done in a variety of ways. They involve splatters of paint, copies, transparencies, graphite, white-out tape, and an abundance of strapping, electrical, masking tape on velum and typing, rag, and tracing papers.
Inspired by a fly-over from Baltimore to Los Angeles, this series reflects the lush diversity of an expansive continent: seasonal flooding, fresh-plowed agricultural gridding, meandering switchback creeks and the urban sprawl inching across the horizons-highlighted by rolling afternoon shadows, creeping toward sunset.
A rare and unexpected blizzard pushed through the Donner Summit in my home state of California on March 1, 2024. Screening of real-time news footage of the I-80 closure, and inevitable logjam of stalled vehicles, was complimented by storm-chaser video of near white-out conditions off-road at the summit. The sheer blinding force of this phenomena lead to this consideration of nature's overwhelming power to completely stop modern movement.
