Katherine Wilson often walks around campus in her Doc Martins, clutching a tablet in one hand and a stylus in the other, always sketching out her latest piece. For her, the act of creating visual art is a ritual driven by her creativity and her macabre fantastical imagination. Every piece seems to capture some sort of absurdist dreamlike world.
Katherine is a CCD student and was the former “Printer’s Devil” for Talon. She has a passion for art and graphic design that catches the attention of anyone looking at her artwork. She gets personal and deeply unapologetic with her work. Truly, the art is not there to impress the viewer it only stares back in apathy. It is not candid, and it is not interested in aesthetics. It just simply is. Her art carries itself on its punk-rock attitude and its lavish outlandish presentation.
Her figures do not exist in worlds; they exist in voids separated from each other almost like peering into your very own pocket dimension. And for a second it feels like they were all sketched by some alternate LSD fueled version of Salvador Dali creating posters for Woodstock in 1968. If her art could talk it would probably speak a language all on its own; it doesn’t want to be understood it just wants to be heard and all we as viewers can do is listen and take it all in.
Katherine Wilson’s love of art was fostered at a young age. “There was never not a time in my life where I wasn’t creating something and if I wasn’t it was really bad,” she said. She refers to art as a “survival mechanism” in her life. This admiration and complete love of visual creation would remain a hobby until high school where her official art career began.
At the age of 16, she was mentored by a teacher for a year and had the privilege of getting some experience with various digital software such as Adobe Photoshop. This mentor proved to be an asset. In her words “She showed me how to set up my resume and how to not be taken advantage of as a young freelancing artist.” This was her introduction to the world of freelance work and art commission, which comes with its own risks and rewards.
You can set your own rates and work, for the most part as fast or as slow as you wish. But on the internet, there is always someone trying to steal from you. For every good commission story, there are at least 3 bad ones. Katherine recalls an experience when she accidentally sent a work in progress to a client before they had paid her for her time. Suffice to say she never heard back from them. But she does not look back on it as a massive mistake.
Instead, she acknowledged her mistake and owned up to it and reshuffled how she structured her commissions, so it did not happen again. Occurrences like this are sadly common in the freelance world and even the more prestigious art world of galleries and museums. People very often do not want to pay for art no matter the price. Art in a business setting is a commodity. It is viewed as a good that has monetary value regardless of its deeper meaning.
In short, the art business is cutthroat and largely apathetic towards struggling artists. Part of this is caused by the integration of software such as Photoshop. If everyone can open a program and make art is it still valuable? Is the work of the artist diminished because of the digital nature of the art itself? When asked what medium Katherine preferred, she said: “Do you want to be a starving artist, or do you actually want to make money?”
Digital is more lucrative and easier to market and trade. However, people simply do not view it in the same way as they would view a master painter. They tend to view digital artists as a dime a dozen and artists that primarily work in a digital medium are often seen as talentless, almost like the program is holding their hand through the process of creation. which is simply not true. As a businessperson Katherine has been able to achieve a level of success that is frankly quite impressive given her very esoteric style.
Her main platform is Instagram under the name “spicykatastrophe.” She charges 100 dollars upfront for each piece she creates and makes a point to inform the consumer that this payment is non-refundable “It’s still my livelihood. The idea of selling your art as a side gig seems very peculiar at first, it seems unstable. And let us face it, where there is a market for art, there are also critics ready to tear you to pieces and point out every minute flaw in your art.
This, despite themselves never having even touched a box of crayons. It is not an easy side hustle, but it is rewarding in the best possible way. When you create something for someone else it can really mean a lot to that person that you took the time out of your day to give them a piece of you, and you can’t just buy or sell that. Money, in this case, is the byproduct, not necessarily the endgame for most artists.
When asked if creating art ever felt like work, Katherine’s answer was no. “The only time art has ever felt like work to me was when I was an art student,” she added.
Katherine Wilson is someone I would describe as an artist’s artist she makes what she wants, and she enjoys creating for the sake of creating. Selling her artwork is a bonus but it most certainly is not the main reason behind her work.
The art is a part of her and is intrinsically tied to her emotional state of being. In her words, “[Art] is really tied to my overall happiness as a person and my overall functioning.” In essence, Katherine has found a way to bridge the gap between starving artist and successful artist using social media and has achieved a type of balance. In doing so, she creates the things that she wants to create and there are people out there willing to pay for them. She is at or close to creative and financial harmony.