The Life & Art of Katie Southworth
* Thank you Palmer’s Market for sponsoring our cover feature.
by PAMELA DEY VOSSLER / photos by: BAMBI RIEGEL riegelpictureworks.com
| | | | | Katie in her Knowlton Street studio in Bridgeport, “Apricity” (left) in background.
Apricity. It means the warmth and light of the sun in winter. A word out of context for spring? Not when considering the life and abstract art of Darien native Katie Southworth—and the light and color she taps into for both. They’re more than enough to dispel all manner of winters.
Which is exactly as she intends.
Katie, a 2012 graduate of Darien High School (DHS), is a full-time independent artist who uses her art to promote joy and mental wellness. A case in point: a painting she did called “Apricity.” In her description of it, Katie wrote: “The first time I heard (the word apricity), I nearly melted. I think it’s one of the best, most beautiful, and most ubiquitous examples of an easily missed good thing during a tough time. Once you learn it, and start noticing it, it’s almost impossible to keep taking it for granted. And then, you start finding warmth during coldness, and light during darkness in more areas of life.”
…and those colors! “You can’t get them without light,” Katie points out passionately. “Color is energy. Energy is joyful and joy is what makes us feel alive,” she said.
| | | | | “Towel for a Giant,” 144×65 acrylic on canvas. Piece statement: “It’s always fun to see things on a larger-than-life scale. Including one’s own ambitions, dreams and vision for the future. Which was my intention for this piece. Through a playful, imaginative lens, I see what a giant might take to the beach. Through a psychological lens, I see an overcompensation of joy that I think is missing from the modern human experience.” / photo courtesy: Katie Southworth
Katie paints intuitively without visual reference and calls color “her language.” She uses it as a metaphor for emotions, memories and hopes for the future. It’s what she paints.
“Color reflects so perfectly for me how many emotions we have, how many human experiences we can have, the interactions we have, it goes on and on,” said Katie. “I love how infinitely diverse and full of possibility the world of color is.”
To her, color is, above all, a path to mental wellness. “My work is about celebrating and focusing on color and light as a way of promoting mindfulness and joy and ultimately staying away from darkness and depression,” Katie explained. It drives all she creates, in honor of and inspired by her mom – former DHS Gymnastics Coach Ellie Southworth – who she lost to suicide in 2015, one week prior to her senior year at Colby College.
| | | | | Katie with her mom / photo courtesy: Katie Southworth
“We didn’t know that she was even living with any type of illness until eight months before we lost her,” said Katie.
With her art, Katie gets to what’s going on beneath the surface. It provides a way to tackle the not-so-perfect things in our lives and inspires a more joyful way forward.
“I feel like (my mom) was forced either through pressures or stigma or fear to hide so much of what she was actually going through. My work helps me decide each day that I’m not going to do that,” said Katie. “If there’s anything I can learn from what she went through it’s that keeping everything in is just not an option,” she continued.
It’s a decision she helps others make as well through the light, vitality and vibrancy of her art. She opens the door to her paintings through piece statements that take people behind the curtain, to her thoughts, memories and emotions contained in each work. They are also her invitation to viewers to explore what the creations evoke in them, inspiring them to embrace vulnerability in their own lives as the irresistible pull of her art compels them to the same place of truth, authenticity and meaning that she finds in creating it. In sharing her take on the world in her art, Katie creates space for others to understand theirs.
| | | | | “Tiger Lily,” 24×24 in oil and tempered glass on panel. Piece statement: “Never forget, beautiful human, that you have a fierce, brazen, fiery spirit somewhere within you. Like a roaring, summer-born tiger lily, face toward the sun, open, wild and free.” / photo courtesy: Katie Southworth
“The dark parts of the human experience are really depressing to talk about,” acknowledged Katie, “but over a welcoming, visually appealing piece of art, it just flows. It’s a catalyst for honest conversation,” she continued, describing the ways in which so many have reacted to her art. “It’s amazing how much more willing people are to open up once they’ve been sort of welcomed by something not threatening,” she added.
With more than 250 of her original works in private and public collections in 50+ cities across the nation, it’s an invitation an ever-growing number of devotees are thrilled to accept—though she never imagined anything like this for herself.
“My whole life right now is a giant surprise to me,” said Katie.
Sure, she has loved art for as long as she can remember, but being an artist “was never an ambition of mine growing up,” laughed Katie.
| | | | | “Number One,” 40×30 in oil, 3D mixed media and mirror on panel. Piece statement: “It’s normal, healthy and important to place yourself at the center. Self- care is affirming each day that you are surrounded by love, and that love starts with yourself. Because we are all pink on the inside, and at the end of the day it’s just us and the skin we’re in against the world. That’s why taking care of you, filling your cup before you serve others, that matters.” / photo courtesy: Katie Southworth
At DHS, she was a standout three-sport athlete. She earned first-team all FCIAC honors in gymnastics and swam well enough to make the swim team at Colby where she became one of the top swimmers in the Division III league in which Colby competes. She also pole vaulted for the track team during her “off season.”
“I was a jock, a student-athlete. That was my lane,” said Katie, who won the DHS female athlete award for her class in her senior year.
It wasn’t until her last year at Colby, after she lost her mom, that she began to “feel like an artist.” Before, studio art had been something she enjoyed but pursued as just a minor while she majored in psychology. After losing her mother, it became a lifeline.
Describing her return to Colby after her mom died, Katie said, “I felt I’d be okay, surrounded by healthy friendships and professors I knew would be there for me. Part of me then didn’t know I needed art, but it was the one thing that both sustained my attention and helped me process my trauma; it helped in a way that no family member, friend or therapist could have.”
Thanks to some shifts in requirements, she was able to add a major in Studio Art her senior year and became a double major. She need “only” produce a capstone project. With her signature drive, she completed it …and won the Charles Hovey Pepper Prize, the single studio art award Colby gives each year.
It was a big deal. Validating …though Katie had been so absorbed in her work, she barely knew it existed, let alone that it was something she could win.
Still, it took a while for her to see herself wholly as the artist she has, in fact, always been. After graduating, and unsure of her path, Katie took “the first job that sounded not awful:” a one-year position in the AmeriCorps City Year program in which applicants who make it through the rigorous screening process spend a year at an urban public school as a teacher’s assistant. Placed at the Trotter Innovation School in Roxbury, MA, Katie started an after-school art club for fourth graders, many of whom had never held a paintbrush.
“I would watch these kids that needed so much come in after school just seething in anger …and then leave feeling so much better,” recalled Katie. “I had no time to plan anything miraculous, but sometimes simply an hour of doodling or whatever, just totally calmed them,” she added. “It was a perfect way to see the true power of what art can do.”
Inspired by her City Year, Katie entered a one-year intensive program at the Tufts School of the Museum of Fine Arts to earn a Masters in teaching art. Next came three years of teaching elementary school art at the James Otis Elementary School in Boston …and increasing despair as her self-care hit the cellar.
She’d gone from grieving her mom’s death, to adding a major, to finishing college (by way of that massive capstone project), to an all-consuming City Year, to an accelerated master’s program, and then straight to full-time work. No breaks. No breath. No painting.
“I kind of forgot how to take care of myself. I was desperate to have independence and start my own life. So I did that, and I was like, cool. I have a salary. I have my own apartment, with roommates or whatever, but I’m miserable,” said Katie.
Something had to change.
| | | | | Katie with (from left) “Transient,” 48×36 in oil and acrylic on panel, and “Divergence,” 48×36 in oil and acrylic on panel
Again, her art called to her—offering the same respite it brought before. Impossibly, she landed studio space in the SoWa arts district of Boston in February 2020 within just months of deciding she needed it. (It’s something that takes years, typically, to pull off.)
Then COVID hit.
“All of a sudden, right when I chose to get back to something that made me feel healthy, there was nothing but time for it,” said Katie.
It takes effort not to see the universe calling in Katie’s life.
When she wasn’t teaching on Zoom, Katie spent “every spare millisecond” (as she says) of those quiet years in her studio, sequestered with a mix of oils, light and increasingly larger canvases. A distinct artistic point of view emerged, centered on vivid color, vertical lines and minimalism—her “through lines,” she calls them. Next came wood blocks, mirrors, gold and silver leaf, bits of this and that, recycled tape from previous work and even acrylic, laying more of the groundwork for the mixed media abstract artist she is today.
Feeling the pull to pursue her art full time from an ever-increasing following of buyers and admirers, Katie resigned from her job in August 2021, smack in the middle of COVID. It was a risky but calculated leap of faith based on passion, purpose and self-understanding.
“Life is so precious. We only have so much time so what do we really want to do? COVID inspired me to lean into this thing that was giving me so much hope and meaning and sense of purpose in a really dark time,” confided Katie who credits part of her success to “being as true to myself as possible.”
“I started doing art again for my own mental health,” she added. “But then, seeing how people would feel so uplifted or calmed down or welcome to express their own life from looking at my work, I realized that this might be more of what I’m supposed to do,” she said.
“The self I was wouldn’t recognize the self I am now,” she observed, laughing. But, “you’re allowed to change,” she continued, more seriously.
Artist? Philosopher? Therapist? Crusader? Katie Southworth is all of the above.
“Katie Southworth is a young woman holding wisdom beyond her years. She has transformed personal suffering into a beautiful message for us all. When you view her art and read her inspiring words, take a moment and breathe it in deeply. There is surely magic here!” said Chris Chance, a New-Hampshire-based clinical psychologist Katie met at one of her art shows last summer.
“Yes I did lose my mom. And that was really horrible and heartbreaking. But also I learned empowerment and self-sufficiency and to appreciate the joy in each day,” said Katie who feels her mom with her every day as she pursues her art and the mission contained within it. “A lot of what I do honors my mom’s legacy and advocates for a world that she would have liked to live in a little more.”
“No one is alone in the crushing reality of surviving loss to suicide and we are all part of the solution for a world without it,” she added.
Apricity? You bet. In every way.
On Her New Book:
Named for the order of colors in a prism—R-O-Y-B-G-I-V, also an acronym for the rainbow, Katie’s debut book features close to 100 full color images of her favorite pieces and coinciding statements. Organized by topic, the book chronicles everything from her childhood to her story of loss to her transition to full-time artist. Available soon on Amazon. Subscribe to her mailing list at Katiesouthworthart.com/contact for updates.
For more on Katie: Now back in Connecticut, visit katiesouthworthart.com, follow her on Instagram @katiesouthworth_art, Facebook @KatieSouthworthArt or see her by appointment at her new studio in The Knowlton at 305 on Knowlton Street in Bridgeport. She also takes commissions and donates a percentage of her sales to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
