MONROE — Kathy King is a retired art teacher who has a true love and passion for art of all kinds. Right now, she specializes mostly in pottery while doing painting, but she does some welding as well with her sculptures. While she has done many different forms of art throughout her life, she has always really liked pottery and sculpting.

“I make functional pieces as well as sculptural pieces. I’m doing a sculptural show at the Monroe Arts Center in February and March. I’ll be in the gallery in the show called Figuratively Speaking. It’s all figures,” she said. “The girl I’m doing it with is Ruth Vander Horck, and she is a sculpture artist as well, but she works in molds and most of her things are about women and their political issues, where mine are more about humor and body language and how we relate to each other.”

Of the art pieces she has created, one of her favorites is the continuous series of sculptures called Keepers that she works on.

“I really like the direction I’m going with my Keepers. My Keepers are my sculptures. When I retired in 2019, it was just before the pandemic hit, and I told myself I wasn’t going to volunteer for anything for a full year. I really just wanted to focus on myself for a little bit, and I knew I always wanted to do figures, so I started making figures. And then the pandemic hit and we couldn’t go anywhere, so I made more,” she said. “You know, you have to find something you don’t get tired of doing. I knew I loved pottery and the reason I chose pottery for my medium was because it’s something I could use as a surface to draw on, I could paint on the surface, I could make a sculpture using the material, and I could make something functional with the material.”

Her Keeper sculptures are unique, with people being drawn to certain ones over others, and she enjoys hearing the different reactions to them and ways that people use them.

“I’ve had therapists buy them because they say they have had clients that are anxious, that it’s a good tool to use to have them write down their worries and what they’re anxious about, and put it in the head of the Keeper and let them worry about it for a week and take a break,” she said.

King didn’t start out with her pottery knowing what she wanted to do or specialize in. It took time for her to develop her own style.

“I needed to hone in on exactly what I wanted, so I started doing some wood firing. I would draw on the outside and then glaze the inside. That is where I fell in love with what I do. I like a technique called sgraffito; it is a technique that a lot of printmakers and people that do a lot of drawing do,” King said. “So I am throwing the piece, and then I’ll coat it with a color, and then I’ll draw my design, and then I’ll carve away the negative space. It’s that printmaking skill that I had that I taught for a lot of years that I’m using in this, and I just like the look. I like that it looks a little bit like a woodcut or like a linoleum block print. I love that I draw every piece by hand, I don’t use stencils, and that I try to tell a story.”

She began doing art when she was younger as a way to relax from the stress and frustration that school would sometimes cause her.

“When I was in elementary school, I struggled with learning to read and I had a third grade teacher that talked to my parents and said, ‘Kathy has a lot of talent in art and I think you need to embrace that for her so she has something that she’s not frustrated with doing.’ So my parents started giving me art lessons. I went to an older woman and I had art lessons in her basement all the way into high school. It was my Saturday morning release that I could just go and paint,” King said.

King also went to college for art and became an art teacher herself, doing that as her career for around 30 years before retiring and focusing on the art she so enjoys making.

“I taught school for a lot of years, about 30 years I was the art teacher, and the last 22 years I was at the Monroe High School. I taught graphics, painting, printmaking, jewelry making, and ceramics,” King said. “I built the ceramics department from nothing. When I got to the high school, I found a couple of kick-wheels in the basement and brought them up into the classroom so the kids could have a chance to try throwing pottery, and the way I learned how to throw was on a kick-wheel, so I thought, why not? Then I wrote a grant to get an electric wheel, and then when we did the remodeling in 2000, I put in for four wheels, so we had five electric wheels and I kept one of the kick-wheels.”

King didn’t originally start out wanting to be a teacher, though. All she really knew was that she wanted to do art.

“When I went to college, I wanted to be a painter and I wanted to get a Fine Arts degree in painting, and my mom talked me into going into teaching because she wanted me to have security and a pension when I retired. I caved, because it made sense and because every art class I took, I loved and I knew I had a love for not just painting but other things too,” she said. “Once I got my degree, that’s what I did. I taught middle school, K-12, and spent most of my time at the high school, and I loved every minute of it. When I finished, I knew I wanted to just be an artist.”

She is most inspired by other artists and their abilities, as it helps her learn and grow as an artist herself.

“I get inspired by what other artists can do, and I think it creates a challenge for me to maybe mimic what they’re doing to learn whatever that skill is. I think maybe it’s that it inspires me to be a lifelong learner and that’s how I approach it. I look at it as a challenge to do something different or maybe I’ll have an idea in my head and I’ll search out ways to solve that problem and then I experiment until I figure it out,” she said.

King tries to get around to do shows in Monroe, Green County, and the surrounding area that display the art made by a variety of artists.

“A couple of things I have looking forward are the exhibit at the MAC in February and March. I think that’s something I’m anxious and excited about, and I’m doing an art tour with another artist, her name is Julie Sutter-Blair. She is a printmaker that handpaints all of her prints, and the subjects in her work and the subjects in my work really work together, so I’m doing a show with her, next spring in May and I’m excited about that. It’s the Mt. Horeb Art Tour, and there are multiple tour spots where you can go to people’s studios, and at each studio, there are two to four artists there that you can see their work,” she said.

While King does specialize mostly in pottery right now, she also has a true passion for painting, some of which can be seen around Monroe. She painted the murals in Baumgartner’s Cheese Store and Tavern, as well as making 11 different paintings for Cheese Days. Her Cheese Days paintings would focus on different aspects depending on the year, such as a historical one that focused on the history of Monroe, and one about the cheesemakers within Green County. No matter what kind of art she is doing, King wants to tell a story and show her love and appreciation for art.