In the years following her MFA studies at Pratt, Kay WalkingStick embarked on a long engagement with abstraction that defined her artistic output for much of the 1970s and early 80s. By her own account, The Yellow Line is the most spare of these works, which, beginning with the Chief Joseph series, sought to reconcile aesthetic formalism with charged emotion.¹ By the late 70s, when this work was executed, WalkingStick was producing a series of paintings underpinned by a grid, the driving force to her works’ compositional arrangement from this period.² These paintings typically consisted of two layers of canvas adhered together, split by gashes, and mounted on thick stretchers, which lent them a distinct sculptural element.³

      In The Yellow Line, two arcs and three incisions suggesting a skewed triangle disrupt an immediate reading of the grid-based structure of the work. The singular “line” of the painting’s title offers the key to its arrangement, and by tracing the suggested triangle to the edges of the canvas, the precisely executed composition emerges. The left-hand and lower lines, each of which is exactly half the length of the canvas, can be followed to the bottom corner of the work. Meanwhile, the locus of the connected incisions lands at the center of the canvas, exactly one quarter of the way down. On this highly formal structure, WalkingStick created a surface at odds with the calculated composition of the painting using a mixture of wax and acrylic on which she then produced an all-over motif of frenzied marks (fig. 1). These marks, which the artist made by running her fingers through the paint and then further manipulating the surface with a screwdriver, appear almost as ripples under certain lighting, offering a scintillating organic surface that acts as a foil to the grid beneath.

      Though created six years apart, in its use of the hand as a painting tool and its reliance on the triangle as a distinct compositional element, The Yellow Line recalls the artist’s earlier mid-1970s apron paintings. Apron Agitato (1974), for instance, similarly relies on rhythmically spaced handprints across the silhouette of an apron, which hangs suspended from a triangle. In that piece, as in her later abstract work, WalkingStick establishes a dialog between the crisply rendered compositional foundation and the exuberant marks that overlay it. In The Yellow Line, the correspondence to the artist’s body lies in the size of the canvas, which, at four by four feet, allowed WalkingStick to move the painting with ease in her New Jersey attic studio. The trace history of these physical movements remains in the fingerprints of paint running along the back of the canvas.

      The duality of The Yellow Line—of emotion and formalism, of organic mark and tightly conceived composition, even of the contrast between marks made by the artist’s hands and by her tools—is evocative of the defining motif of WalkingStick’s oeuvre, a conceptual keystone to which the artist’s work continually returns. To a degree, this duality speaks to WalkingStick’s identity as biracial woman of Cherokee heritage, and she has spoken at length about her experience straddling Native and Anglo-American culture as an artist. Indeed, the arc shape that appears in the basis of the composition in The Yellow Line is drawn from an earlier sculptural work which recreated a tipi, an exploration of the artist’s Indian heritage on her father’s side of the family. The crescent shape formed by the canvas hanging from the poles of the tipi became a recurrent motif in WalkingStick’s work in the paintings that followed, where it was repurposed in its use from symbolic to formalist ends. However, WalkingStick’s expansive output defies simple categorization, bridging modernist tendencies, emotion, and in her later work, spirituality.

¹ Conversation with the artist, March 11, 2022.

² For an overview of this period of the artist’s career, see Kate Morris, “What Lies Beneath: Sacred Geometries, 1970-83” in Kathleen Ash-Milby and David W. Penney, Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2015), 49-75.

³ Walkingstick notes that her knowledge of sewing was helpful in producing the three dimensional aspects of the works. Conversation with artist, 2022.


Image courtesy the artist and Hales Gallery. Photo by Stan Narten. Figure photo by the Horseman Foundation.