Kate McCavitt’s creative evolution August 29 2025, 0 Comments
By Kimberly Nicoletti
Kate McCavitt epitomizes what it means to be an artist: Namely, a constant curiosity, openness and a desire to learn — the latter of which includes everything from new techniques and materials to new places and people. She believes that cumulatively, the novelty allows her to transcend what she’s currently creating while also preserving the best of what she has already developed.
This weekend, she spends the first half painting in our Breckenridge North location and then moves over to Vail Aug. 31 to Sept. 1. She is happy to talk about her process, approach to creativity and anything else people would like to discuss.
For about a decade, starting in 1986, she studied Sumie, or the Asian brush, which includes pictorial and calligraphy practice, through a Zen master in Encinitas, California. The discipline taught her about intentional brushstrokes and Asian aesthetics, including respect for placement, numbers and the value of negative space, in addition to art as a meditative practice.
When a workshop introduced her to golden fluid acrylics about 20 years ago, she fell in love with the rich concentration of pigment and the fact that she could stain, rather than obscure, her substrate. She adds up to a dozen transparent washes to generate a rich depth, with a reflective illumination of the initial metallic layer.
The 13 new paintings she debuts this weekend blend Western-American features with Asian sensibilities and shimmerings.
While these use most of the same materials, including gold leaf, they are paving the pathway for her to more heavily revisit some of her early Asian influences.
“I always feel like my current work is like a trail marker to where I'm going next, but it's not always apparent to the viewer in the same way that it is obvious to me,” she says.
In the past, she used gold leaf as a background, covering it up with several layers of washes. These days, she’s playing around with letting more of the gold leaf shine through.
“Somehow, all of this feels like a metaphor for the full circle that has been my art life. I want to leave more of that and then just work on top of it in new ways, and, for me, the way that springs into my mind is less about using mixed-media techniques and more about using the Asian brush techniques,” she says.
She’s not sure exactly what direction this will all take her, which is exactly what captivates her and keeps her fresh. In Asian traditions, they call it beginner’s mind, “which is somehow a pure form of who you really are because you haven’t learned to let a lot of other stuff influence you,” she says. “It’s a more intense focus — less on technique and more on exploration within the creative movement itself.”
She defines the essence of creativity as exploring and “finding something that makes your heart sing.” It begins with a belief that you can be creative and comes full circle as you share it with those who appreciate it.
She likens creativity to climbing a mountain, an excursion that takes you in different directions to become better than you were before. And when a “crisis of confidence” strikes — as it does for everyone — she looks inside to see what it’s about and keeps moving through it. She stokes her creativity through artists dates to museums and galleries, new music or simply exploring something she hasn’t done before.
About six years ago, she discovered DecoArt’s 24K Gold metallic paint, which has sparked her imagination, as she uses it alone or mixes it with golden fluids or pearlescent inks.
Likewise, aspens continually surprise her.
“I think the best way to paint aspens is to really spend time among them and listen to them, look at them, touch them, explore them, peel some bark off and see what they're all about and make sure that you have an opportunity to see how they adjust and live through all of the different seasons of the year,” she says.
She keeps various files for aspens, from morning to evening, leafy to bare, tall to wide and old to young, the latter of which she says sometimes look like “little old people who’ve already been through a lot in their life.”
She climbs mountains to obtain broader views of the aspens, and that metaphor extends into her life.
“It’s about learning new creative procedures. It's about taking classes. It's about studying more. It's about trying out new techniques: That is climbing a mountain,” she says. “To get the broader view to see how it’s going to fit into your art, you have to go off trail a little bit and find your way and maybe feel lost a little bit and feel like, ‘Oh, I can’t get through this way. I’ll have to go another way.’ So hiking in aspens — going up the mountain — is a darn good metaphor for the creative process itself.”
