Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935 Syracuse, NY) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She received a BFA from Beaver College (now Arcadia University) Glenside, PA in 1959 and an MFA from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY in 1975.

Over a career spanning five decades, WalkingStick has dedicated her practice to painting, focusing on the American Landscape and its metaphorical significances to Native Americans and people across the world. WalkingStick draws on formal modernist painterly traditions as well as the Native American experience to create works that connect the immediacy of the physical world with the spiritual. Attempting to unify the present with history, her complex works hold tension between representational and abstract imagery. Her paintings represent a knowledge of the earth and its sacred quality.

From the mid-1970s WalkingStick shifted away from previous figuration towards abstraction, which coincided with her burgeoning interest into Native American histories and her own heritage. In this critical period of work, WalkingStick is highly attuned to the expressive qualities of colour drawn from the Native American experience, especially those that reflect feelings of loss and tragedy.

Forming a physical connection to these works, WalkingStick used her hands to spread acrylic paint and saponified wax, creating a thickly layered surface. She would build up around thirty layers, then once the layers were dry, she would gouge the surface with a woodcutter’s tool to create crisp, sharp lines. WalkingStick mixed acrylic paint with wax to take away the shiny, plastic look of the acrylic to form a more earthy, natural appearance. She enjoyed the process of working with wax because it would make the studio smell like honey.

The impasto surface of these paintings is sculptural and creates a cartographic texture of subtle ridges and valleys. WalkingStick’s practice is both a visual record of her experience on earth and her attempt to come to terms with a Native American history that has been forgotten or ignored. In these minimalist paintings of rich colours and bold forms there is a sense of ancestral presence and a deep connection to place.

The swirling red surface of Single Line Emblem Hidden (1981) is scored with three measured lines. WalkingStick creates this effect by layering canvas, painting the first layer and then adding a second layer which is cut with a geometric composition before building up further layers of paint and wax. WalkingStick explored the idea of the line as an emblem in a parallel work, Single Line Emblem, Exposed (1981), which is in the permanent collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY.