Interview with Kate Ricketson

Scuttlebutt will be interviewing members of our special community over the coming months to add some flair to our weekly newsletter! Small business owners and managers, artists, students, our team members - people who we think you’ll love to learn a little more about!

Kate Ricketson is a Landscape Architect and Artist. She lives in Westport with her husband Will, and adorable Scuttlepup, Shaemus! You can view her incredible artwork in the dining room at Scuttlebutt, and on her website!

Hi! Tell us about yourself? 

My husband, Will, and I moved to Westport after living in New Zealand for his job. We both had grandparents on the South Coast growing up and fell in love with this area as kids. As adults, we feel so lucky to have found an amazing community in this place.

How did you get started with print making?

I was introduced to printmaking as a kid, my mom studied printmaking in college and shared the process with me at a pretty early age. I delved further into the medium in high school where I was lucky enough to learn from another exceptional printmaker, Barbara Putnam. I started experimenting with block printing on fabric while living in Auckland and then did my first large scale woodblock as a part of Big Ink (www.bigink.org) in 2022. Since then, I can’t seem to stop carving!

What do you do to relax besides making art?

Gardening and hiking/jogging/biking are all ways I get outside to find relaxation and inspiration. I’m also a big reader and can get totally lost in stories for hours on end. 

Any favorite native flowers or trees our readers / gardening customers should know more about?

SO hard to choose favorites in the plant world. I have favorite individual trees that I greet along routes I travel regularly (one of them is featured in the small piece at Scuttlebutt). I do also have some particular favorites in the garden, like sweet fern (Comptonia peregrina) and meadow rues (Thalictrum sp.), but truly I’m discovering new plants and new uses for plants daily; that learning and loving journey never ends.

What is your favorite menu item at Scuttlebutt?

Literally anything with the roasted broccoli, you claim it’s just regular roasted broccoli, Casey, but I know there’s magic fairy dust involved. 

What’s your favorite place you’ve ever traveled?

Another hard question! The first place that comes to mind is Great Barrier Island (Aotea in Māori) off the coast of New Zealand. Anyplace where hitch-hiking is the official form of public transportation and rivers run with hot spring water has my vote.

What do you love most about the South Coast?

It’s a tie between the landscape and the community! I knew I loved the physical landscape of this place but the exceptionally warm, passionate, and artistic community around here was such an incredible surprise and I feel so lucky to be a part of it.

How can we buy your original art and digital prints?

My original prints that I did with Big Ink are hanging in Scuttlebutt where you can view them in person before considering purchase (thank you!!). You can also purchase digital prints of them. Information about both is available HERE.

Can you tell us a little bit more detail about the pieces hanging in Scuttlebutt?

The production of woodblock prints is a multi-step process, and each step offers a chance for experimentation and evolution of the piece. I begin with a photo or collection of photos and make a drawing using pen and ink. This helps me refine the composition and start to develop a pattern language for different elements. Typically, the drawings are 11x17” maximum, so I enlarge them and reflect them (make a mirror image) on the computer. This large, reflected image is what I transfer to the woodblock. I’m hoping to refine this process so it’s a little less time-consuming, but at the moment that involves tracing the drawing over a piece of graphite paper so the linework transfers to the woodblock, then, drawing the whole composition again with a black marker. I also paint the woodblock blue so that as I carve, I know how much I still have to remove. Everything that is white (no ink) on the prints you see was removed by hand using a series of chisels and gouges. The surface that remains is what the ink is spread on and then the block is put through a large printing press. For large pieces, this process takes about three months of work. With smaller pieces, I can develop the composition and carving much faster and transfer the ink to the paper using a hand-held barren rather than a press.

All of the pieces hanging in Scuttlebutt are originals, meaning they were pulled directly off the woodblock. I do this in very small batches, so there are only two originals of Autumn Meadow 1 (one for sale), and four originals of June Hayfield 1 (two for sale). The two large prints you see at Scuttlebutt are the ones I scanned at extremely high resolution so that I could make some digital reproductions (the image is printed on paper at a print shop), which I can offer at much lower prices as they are not part of a limited edition. Horseneck Juniper is a one-of-a-kind Artists Proof because after I made this print, I made alterations to the block, so there will never be another print just like this. Have additional questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out through my websiet, I’m always here to talk art and landscape.