Blue Chisel Studio Kat Goetz Warfield BC bluechiselstudio@gmail.com

Surrounded as I am by the untamed beauty of the area around Warfield, BC, where I live, nature informs most of my work. All of my landscape linocuts are interpretations of remote or little-known areas in my immediate surroundings, or of more distant places I visited, which resonated with me deeply. (My ongoing Heron Road series is inspired by a road trip along the back roads of Canada and the USA, west coast to east coast and back – a year-long journey my husband and I made while living in a small truck camper from 2016-2017). 

My aim, as an artist, is to draw the viewer into the images I create and to invite them to share in the emotion I myself experience or have experienced in the places I depict. In this respect, colour plays a significant role in most of my linocuts. I tend to use colour intuitively and I believe individual colours, much like musical notes, can work together to create a uniquely harmonious composition.

I’ve been a printmaker since 2007 and, although some of my early prints were more graphic in style, my current work is an exploration of painterly printmaking. I particularly love the challenge of making reduction prints, referred to as ‘suicide prints’ by Picasso, where layer upon layer of ink is applied to a single piece of lino which is carved away little by little until there’s almost nothing left of it. 

I’m continuously curious to discover how far I can push this traditionally graphic medium to produce images with a subtler, dreamlike quality.