So, from being a place where I put all of my art during high-school to being my current professional art-portfolio website, deviantART and I have gone through quite a bit together.

In light of this recent development, I thought I'd make my journal into more of an informal artist statement. so, here goes.

I'm Katherine Powell, I am currently a BFA with a concentration in mixed media and printmaking at the University of Western Washington.

the current series I am working on, Deer Girl, is a semi-narrative exploration into illustration and the boundary between the story of the life of the artist and the story that artist is telling.  Each piece is inspired by emotionally charged moments in my life that I want to think about and make art about with out it being immediately comprehensible as to what exactly I'm saying or who it's about.

if you dig into this website you will find comics from when I was in highschool that serve a similar purpose in a similar way. Back then I would take a moment, an observation, or a joke, from my day, jot it down onto a notecard and then draw myself and my friends as fantastic creatures and animal-people acting out these little narratives. The notecard-comics would have text, but as my handwriting is nigh incomprehensible I would have to read them aloud and perform them for anybody other than myself to know what exactly I was saying.

It seems old habits are hard to change.

Now that I'm in college I have done my best to distance myself from my artistic beginnings but the wellspring of my inspiration still flows from that same spot of wanting to find my people and my place in the world. Wanting to remember the weird and the good moments, while obsessing and thinking over how the bad bits went wrong.

And now that I've taken to doing more hand coloring I've returned to creating solid black linework through one method and blended color through a second. so, my art is beginning to resemble a spiral, I go the same way over and over again but with a wider range, greater perspective and ever broadening skill.