It All Started With A Dream…

Interview with sculptor and painter Kathie Lostetter

By Jessica Rath

Kathie Lostetter with one of her sculptures. Image credit: Kathie Lostetter.

Compared to busy Abiquiú, Barranco is pleasantly sleepy and, yes, one could say dreamy. Everything proceeds at a slow pace; except for the paved road, things look much like they did 50 years ago, one could imagine. The perfect setting for an artist who has an intuitive connection to everything around her, animals, trees, birds, plants…

​I remembered Kathie Lostetter from many years ago when I participated in the Abiquiú Studio Tour and she was the board president or whatever she was called then. She kindly agreed to an interview for the Abiquiú News, which gave me the chance to learn more about her and her art.

Image credit: Kathie Lostetter.

Kathie grew up in New Jersey where she lived until she went to college in Florida, at the University of Miami. Her family lived near Newark, New Jersey, and then they moved to a lake in Sparta. Because of that, she has many happy memories of her childhood spending the summers in nature, swimming, running around through open fields, meeting wild animals.

​After she finished her university studies Kathie stayed in Florida for a number of years  and then moved to Michigan where she met Al, her husband, who was teaching art there. That was in 1975, just at the time when he was headed to New Mexico. She decided to meet him there, after she had packed up her things and closed that chapter of her life.

Image credit: Jessica Rath.

“He bought this place where we're right now, in 1975,” Kathie explained. “Since then we've added but the main core of it was a ruined adobe. And then we restored the ruin of the Torreon [tower] of the village, which was just a piece of wall. We rebuilt it, and that's where my husband’s studio is now. When we started with the Studio Tour we had lots of people who stopped by, and it was a really nice place to have both of our artwork at the Tour.”

She continued: “I studied art when I was in college. I studied mass media and art, and my idea was to do animation  in film but ended up doing sculptures in clay that are somewhat animated. When in college I did some work in clay and I realized I liked hand building, but I didn’t go too far with it then. After I had moved out here to Barranco, we built all of this. Al and I rebuilt the adobe buildings and then when our sons were bigger, they helped us too. So we started with our home where we’re right now, then we built a bird house for macaws, and then we rebuilt the torreon. And then there was another ruin which we eventually bought and restored. Owen, one of our sons, was living there for a while.”

“When we moved here, we knew we wanted to build passive solar. So then we slowly built this over time, and in the meanwhile I got a job teaching at Head Start, because our little boy was in the program. At first I was the assistant and then I became the teacher. I did that for about eight years.”

But what inspired her to create these beautiful, mythical creatures, I wanted to know.

​“Well, after living here for a while, I wanted to do my artwork again,” Kathie told me. “When I wasn't working, I was interested in folk tales and things like anthropology and petroglyphs and so on.”

Beluga. Image credit: Jessica Rath.

“In the midst of that time I had a dream about an eagle. It was a skeleton covered with something like a buffalo robe. It was really scary! You can imagine, if you see a skeleton in your dream, it's pretty scary. But then it changed into a bald eagle. And so this being with the robe became my first sculpture. It was the Eagle in the Buffalo Robe.”

​Kathie went on: “It became this anthropomorphic thing. When I studied art in college I looked at modern art and I tried to connect to that world, even tried to do art like that. But I guess that I just had to find it myself with the animals. And so that’s what emerged, an anthropomorphic look at animals. The next one I think I did was a bear. So I had the eagle and the bear. And then I started doing any animal – this year, I did three belugas, not together, but three separate pieces of belugas. My granddaughter was so in love with belugas, so I made her one for her birthday. It's such an unusual animal to put in a robe that when I studied it, to sculpt the animal for her, I decided to do one for the gallery as well.”

Image credit: Jessica Rath

What exactly do you mean when you say anthropomorphic, I asked Kathie. Do you mean that an animal is kind of equal to a human being?

She emphatically agreed. “Yes, they are standing like a human being. If you look at Egyptian art, you see for example the head of the Jackal on the body of a man. I just got fixated on portraying animals that way, and it may seem strange but I just proceeded with it.”

I strongly relate to that. Many humans, and especially science, treat animals as inferior, when we’re actually all connected. Of course, we humans have more advanced intellectual faculties, but babies don't have them either, and yet we don't treat them badly just because they cannot put one plus  one together.

​Again, Kathie agreed that she has a similar view. “When you look at ancient art, you realize that they had animal teachers, and that they were given priority over images of humans. Some of them were in the wild, like the painting of a horse running in the caves of Lascaux for example. But then, very early on, they mixed the attributes. I think there's one that's 30,000 years old of a lion man. The head is the lion, and the body is a man. And so that is just what came from inside me. It kind of worked for me. And then I expanded on it, and I was affected by what people liked, and that influenced me.  But my sculptures are always about the fact that it is a sacred animal.”

Image credit: Kathie Lostetter

I had seen some of Kathie’s sculptures but I never really understood what they were about. Her explanation makes a lot of sense and I feel I'm on the same page with her artistic vision.

Image credit: Kathie Lostetter.

My next questions: how do you promote your art and display it in galleries, and also: I wanted to know more about the Studio Tour, because Kathie was one of the first artists who actually started it, if I remember correctly.

​“So maybe let's start with that,” Kathie answered. “I was with the Abiquiú Studio Tour for twenty years. I started showing at a gallery in Santa Fe 35 years ago with just a couple of pieces like a coyote and a bear and now show at The San Francisco Street Gallery. And then Lori and Richard Bock started the Studio Tour, we joined and were so amazed how many people came all the way out here to see our work. And actually, I had some pieces at the Abiquiú Inn pretty far back.”

Snow Leopard. Image credit: Kathie Lostetter.

“My smaller pieces go there, and my larger ones are going to Santa Fe to the gallery. And so, yes, we were excited about the tour, both for me and for my husband who is a painter. We set up a place where people could come and visit in the round building, the torreon. The Studio Tour was great for us. For many years I was the chairperson. In the beginning the whole idea was to keep it going, because I knew it was so good for all the local artists. For some of them it was the main avenue to sell their art.”

​“It was great for people of all levels, artists who are in a gallery and others who were just starting out. It was and is for all different types of art. The tour has been a wonderful thing, and the only reason I quit was because my work takes so long to do. Once this gallery I was in moved to a better location, I just couldn't have any more work, I couldn't keep up with what they wanted. This became too stressful,  plus, at the same time, I was a tour guide at the O'Keeffe House for seventeen years, so I also had a job.”

Image credit: Kathie Lostetter.

Kathie continued: “And so, it all added up: there were not enough hours in the day, and people would come up to visit. They love it up here, Barranco is sort of different, you know!”

At the beginning of the Studio Tour, how many artists did you have, I enquired.

“It may have been about twenty in the beginning, something like that,” Kathie told me. “Maybe even less for the very first tour. Somehow the number twenty four comes to mind, but it was quite small.”

​She continued: “The tour became rather successful, because different people would step up to help keep it going. You know, that was always the hard part, to get people to help run it. Sometimes we met at the Abiquiú Inn, and once we met outside the Parish Hall of the Church, and we had our meeting outside in the Plaza. And then the Clinic was a good meeting place for a while, we got a room there to have our meetings. So it really turned out great. I've still been with it since the Event Center became the place to have the meetings, and that was a really great place for meetings. I totally think it's wonderful. And over here, Tamara is still showing at Nest, and you see the people really showing up.”

Detail of beluga. Image credit: Jessica Rath.

And did you place your pieces in galleries, I wanted to know. How did that develop?

​Kathie’s answer was a bit shocking. “I was in this one gallery in Santa Fe for about eight to ten years, but then it burned down and I lost a lot of my work in the fire. They weren't even insured. Just last night I looked at the article from when it burned. It showed one of my sculptures. I had a piece that was just  laying there, with the firemen behind it, because when they hosed everything down, all the pieces broke. One white deer survived because it was in the back room. The gallery that burned down was on Canyon Road. But then I went to another gallery which  accepted me.”

Sculpture damaged in gallery fire, with photo of piece before it was destroyed. Image credit: Jessica Rath.

Next, Kathie showed me around her home and studio, which was filled with many of her standing animal pieces:  owls, deer, a leopard, a bear. Many of them were mothers with a tiny baby safely tucked into the enveloping robe. She explained the process of creating her sculptures, using the unfinished piece below:

Unfinished sculpture. Image credit: Jessica Rath.

After it’s built by hand in clay, Kathie fires the sculpture in her kiln. Next, it will be painted with oil, which gives the piece its luminosity and vibrancy. She then uses feathers, semi-precious stones, beads, twigs, pieces of leather, and other objects to give each sculpture its stunning personality which has so much warmth but also majesty. Her creations are both playful and awe-inspiring, emanating a deep love for and understanding of the animal depicted. Each one  touches within the viewer feelings which all creatures share, and evokes an eternal wisdom which humans can only hope to attain. Thank you, Kathie, for taking the time to share your beautiful art with the Abiquiú News’ readership.