Un-Grotesque

Hats off to local artist Ryan T Cook, who convinced me to check out works by Santa Fe artist Kate Stringer one recent afternoon at the Luna Center’s New Mexico Hard Cider Taproom (505 Cerrillos Road, (505) 231-0632). I’ve loved Cook’s Fleischer-meets-Bob-Camp style, and as we sipped coffees and chatted, he lit up like woah and almost breathlessly asked, “Dude! Have you seen this Kate Stringer stuff?”

As I had not, and as I take an artist like Cook’s recommendation seriously, we entered the taproom, where Stringer’s illustrations remain on the walls even now as you read this, alongside works by Cook himself and others. I instantly fell in love.

For the most part, Stringer illustrates women, but in a distorted and borderline grotesque fashion. Their foreheads jut out dramatically over strangely smooth faces and bizarre teeth; limbs fly akimbo forming strange positions; eyes hang low on the face beneath shiftless eyebrows, small and sad and out of place. Stringer achieves everything with graphite and a little black watercolor—her works feel like deconstructed and reconstructed pieces created in a centrifuge containing the likes of Mark Ryden and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark illustrator Stephen Gammell, only they’re not quite like anything I’ve ever seen. Instead, they evoke the oddest combination of enticing and repulsive. Stringer’s works remind me of something I can’t put my finger on, and they dredge up a wild gamut of emotions: All at once, they’re creepy and distorted, but beautiful and somehow meaningful in this way that is both apparent yet difficult to put into words. I’ve shown it to others since that first day, and they agree it’s hard to voice precisely why Stringer’s illustrations are so magnetic.

I had questions for Cook: Why had I not heard this name before? Why, with all due respect, is this artist showing in a taproom instead of a gallery like form & concept or KEEP Contemporary?

“Right?” Cook said knowingly.

“You’re goddamned right,” I responded.

Only a few moments passed before I found Stringer on Instagram (@bestfriendmilk, btw, but it’s a private account and you must request followship) and requested an interview. She got back to me shortly thereafter (quick, especially for an artist) and we set a time. Fab.

So, days later, here I am—walking down a driveway at the right address, wrong structure, and frantically messaging Stringer in hopes she’ll come out and give a yell from the right direction. She does, thankfully, and soon we’re in her home studio, where numerous pieces at various stages of completion take over Stringer’s drawing table and most other flat surfaces. A gorgeous black cat peeps out from the shadows behind a large cabinet with almost too many drawers, and sunlight filters in through a particularly shady tree outside in the way only early fall can muster.

Stringer, who practically apologizes for having a spacious downtown home, describes it like a lucky gem situation, and explains she has only lived in Santa Fe since 2019. She arrived with a friend who’s no longer in town, but something kept her around; she has a partner here, also an artist, she works a day job for a cashmere company. Life is good.

“I just think I met the right people here, even though it took a minute for that to happen,” she says. “It took a minute to get into the community here—it’s a small town, and there was COVID on top of that. But I’ve made connections that have been meaningful to me. It’s a good place to get a lot done.”

Part of finding that community was acceptance into local writer Bucket Siler’s annual ZineFest event in 2019. There, Stringer says, she found like-minded arts and words people, though the pandemic obviously halted everything the following year. Stringer was back at ZineFest last May, though, as things started to feel more normal. Being around other artists is her normal. In college at Baltimore’s Maryland Institute College of Art, she focused on ceramics, but started illustrating on those clay pieces. She dabbled in fiber arts and photography, too, but ultimately says jokingly that “I just figured it’s cheaper to draw on paper with pencil.”

Her current series and style came later, Stringer recalls, starting in 2017 or ‘18 and further revealing itself over time. Now she knows exactly what she wants the work to say.

“I was trying to articulate anxiety with twisty fingers, clenched hands, and I just kind of kept going down that rabbit hole,” she explains. “It happened organically. I was trying to draw, and it wasn’t purposeful—but I feel like a lot of women and girls you see in feminine art are always really clean and beautiful. I think I was trying to make gross girls who were beautiful in their grotesqueness.”

That’s exactly it—that familiarity I couldn’t place. Stringer has discovered a way to present the foundations of anxiety (and maybe depression) in a way you’d actually want to have on your walls. It’s subtle, but it’s there, and it feels so obvious once she identifies how it works. Much art is, to a degree, self-portraiture, and this feels like that, too.

“Not directly,” Stringer notes just before I take 2,000 photographs of her at work. “Maybe it’s the weird feelings you get, a reflection of myself, my experience in the world.”

I feel suddenly less alone for a moment, even as my own anxiety rears its head.

“I wouldn’t say that’s a drawing of me,” she continues, “but the images are all in me.”

Check out more work from Stringer at blackgoospider.cargo.site/