I first met Kitty Couch at O’Hare International Airport in the fall of 1991.  Kitty was a finalist for a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California where I’m the Residency Manager.   It’s a residency program specifically for North Carolina artists that is sponsored by the North Carolina Arts Council.  Each year a staff person from Headlands goes to Durham to interview the finalists, but Kitty wasn’t going to be in Durham, she was in Chicago.  And, as it happened, my plane was going through Chicago, so Kitty suggested we do the interview at the airport.  When I got off the plane, I don’t remember that Kitty was holding a sign with my name or anything like that, we just went straight for each other.  And, as you may imagine since Kitty had that magical way of making anyone feel at ease, the next two hours were like spending time with a friend I’d known all my life.   I got on my next plane feeling that the artists I was interviewing in Durham had an impossibly hard act to follow.

 

So Kitty did come to Headlands the following spring with her sometime collaborator, photographer Pinky Bass.  And their arrival was a great relief.  It was toward the beginning of the residency season and the three artists who were there couldn’t stand each other.  I had to put them in separate houses and then they started fighting over the possession of the one tv Headlands had at the time.  Kitty and Pinky were like a healing balm that calmed everything down.  Though they also livened things up considerably and threw a particularly memorable mint julep soaked party, sitting at the grand piano together, singing at the top of their lungs.  One of my favorite memories of Kitty was just before she and Pinky embarked on an illegal blackberry picking expedition (Headlands is in a national park).  Kitty had a dress with a pouch.  She laughed that great laugh of hers and told me that if the Park Rangers stopped her, she would say the bulge in her dress caused by the blackberries was a colostomy bag.  She figured that would put a quick halt to any further investigation.

 

Kitty had a second residency at Headlands in 1994 through the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Arts International Program.  The first part of the residency was spent in Ecuador in a town that was singled out by Kitty for her residency since it had the highest number of centenarians in the world.  Kitty was particularly interested in their attitudes toward aging and dying and had them express their thoughts in clay.  The second part of her residency at Headlands was less successful.  Kitty was frustrated by the fact that the American senior citizens she connected with here were happy to work in clay, but had no interest in – and actually, a fierce resistance to - talking about death.

 

Kitty was one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever known.   She had an infectious joy and a springtime mind when it came to life’s adventures.  Even though she worked in earth, I wanted my painting to capture her spirit and her lightness of being.  The calligraphy element spells Kitty and symbolizes that even though she’s no longer with us physically, she lives on in our words.

 

 

 

Holly Blake has been Residency Manger at Headlands Center for the Arts since 1988.  She has a BFA and MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute.