KATIE COMMODORE

Drawing, painting & embroidery | rhode Island, USA

HOUSE OF THEODORA CHATS TO EROTIC ARTIST KATE COMMODORE

Katie Commodore uses a clever weaving of materials, textures and mediums – from vinyl cut editions to near-life-size tapestries – to capture her friends' vulnerability and joy in discovering their sexual selves. Oh, and she also used to work for Wonder Woman. Read our interview with the wonderfully creative, curious and hilarious Katie below.

What are three words you would use to describe your art?
Obsessive (in a good way), celebratory, and voyeuristic

It sounds like you’ve had a very colourful study and working career. Can you tell me some of your most memorable times as an artist?

I have! I’m not quite sure how to answer this because my most memorable moments are just because I am who I am, not because I’m an artist. However, I’m not sure that everything would have played out in those situations the same way if I wasn’t an artist, but who’s to say?

At the opening of Pace Contemporary Gallery in Chelsea, NYC, I got to meet an artist that I had first met when I was 15, Paul Henry Ramirez, as a student docent at the Aldrich Museum in CT. He recognized me a decade later, which led to having an amazing conversation with Chuck Close and then having the most swoon-worthy conversation with Jeff Goldbloom at the afterparty.  But part of that was being in NYC at the right time and knowing the right people to get into the right party.

I did a semester abroad when I was in college in Italy and we had a field trip to Assissi and I was sitting on top of the mountain in the olive orchard and cried because I had never been anywhere that beautiful and calm before.

When I was in 2nd grade we had to copy a master painting in art class and I copied a Gaugin painting. I remember it being perfect and just like the original, and it was the first moment I knew I could be an artist.

I got to drive a bulldozer after months of overseeing the construction of Maya Lin’s Wavefield at Storm King Art Center. It was awesome.

And then there was the night of three Italian penises in Florence.

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Your art is full of different elements - you use paint and ink and yarn and beads and pearls and rhinestones, and pencil and gold leaf, and you sometimes combine many of them in one artwork. How do you structure your process? How do you decide what you’ll use and where?

Oh my, that’s actually a hard question–let’s start at the beginning. Once upon a time, each idea develops in the mist of my brain; in reality, it all starts with thousands of pictures I’ve taken of my friends posing for me. My computer and cell phone are a minefield; swipe through my camera roll at your own risk. I often have a folder of images that I want to create a piece from sitting on my desktop that are always floating around my head. 

Once things pull together and I get an idea about how that image will manifest, I pull it out and start finding the perfect patterns for that amorphous final idea. The patterns I work with are all historical wallpaper and textile patterns from around the world that have a subtle relation to what I’m trying to say about the subjects’ personalities/relationships/life/ideals/past/future/stuff.

However, at the same time, they often have to do with what I can do within the medium. For instance, if it’s going to be a tapestry, then I need a fairly large digital sample for the patterns, if it’s a painting, then I need it to be something that my hand-eye coordination can handle with tiny, tiny paintbrushes, but above all, it has to be something that works with the image and idea.

From there, it then turns into an exercise of picking the colors, and deciding on the details of the medium; how am I going to pull the viewer in to look at something they might not always want to? (Hint; sparkles and crazy patterns help). For works on paper, I actually plan almost everything out first. For the tapestries and embroidery pieces, it’s all about adding my hand to the piece once I’ve gotten the woven tapestry back from the weaver. How can I create that contrast that I have in my paintings? How do I make sure my hand is seen in this piece and not just the digital aspect of the weaving? How do I bring all my skills to the table? And at the same time, it’s an exercise in “when is enough?” and often, there is no such thing. Almost every piece I do, I still look at and think it needs more. One of my pieces is at a gallery right now and all I can think about is adding beads to his socks, but I can’t, and it keeps me up at night.

The other part that I rarely talk about is that all of the media I use were women-driven crafts until they became “art”.  When they became “art”, the usual male domination of a field took place. Pre-photography newspapers and magazines used wood engraving for images which were mostly carved by women, since it was skilled labor, but not art. Once photography came along, wood engraving became obsolete and eventually became “fine art” and was led by men. Tapestries were often woven by women, but women working for male-owned businesses where the men got credit for all of the designs, whether or not they were designed by men or not. In my paintings, I mainly use gouache, an opaque watercolor, which really came to popular use in the Victorian Era through the 1970’s. It was very popular in the Victorian era to do interior paintings, and although it was a pastime that spanned genders and class, it was still a women-dominated hobby. And by the 1920’s it had become the go-to for advertising and print media mock-ups, which were traditionally designed by men in advertising firms but mocked up and painted by women.

But the only thing I hope that comes across is a celebration of the model and their power and sexuality.  

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What is your favourite material to work with and why?

Damn! You’re hitting me with all the tough questions, without even knowing it!

So, I have MS (Multiple Sclerosis) and am slowly losing my super fine motor skills, which means that I’m slowly losing my ability to control my hands and draw. This is why I’ve spent the past few years figuring out alternative media that I enjoy and work for what I’m doing. This has forced me to move away from art that requires my hands to be able to hold something steady; you can stab a piece of fabric a thousand times before you get the right spot and it’s no big deal. The purely pattern pieces were drawn completely in the computer at a time when my hands were particularly bad but as you can see I still do pieces that are hand drawn and painted with really tiny paintbrushes, and they are still my favorite pieces to do. They may cause me a bunch of anxiety because at any moment my hand could quit and drop the paintbrush and ruin everything, but they are my boo. I’m a drawer at heart. I love working on embroidery second to drawing; it just takes so long! Even though it also has such an amazing impact on viewers. It’s rare to see a piece of erotic art that you can look at in person and, given the almost lifesized scale actually picture yourself in it. 

I must admit when I first saw your work, I had to look twice. I spent many a weekend with my nanna growing up, and she loved tapestry. The walls of the room I used to stay in were speckled with old-school tapestry scenes of villages and little girls with dogs. But yours are modern and kinky and erotic and a true feast for the eyes. How did you come to create these?

It was a long journey, as I mentioned, partially rooted in the history of who it was that did the physical work when it comes to making tapestries versus who gets the credit. I started my adventure in embroidery and fiber arts by trying to learn how to make lace. Yeah, I know, I never start with the easy stuff. I really wanted to learn bobbin lace, but it turned out to be REALLY hard! So, I bought some books on generalized embroidery and white/drawn work embroidery and tried my hand at that. Soon, I started to have fantasies of doing them life-sized. And like most of us went to the holy internet and looked up companies that could produce custom tapestries and came upon a company called Woven Moments, which I think is now out of business, that would digitally weave a picture of your dog or your grandkids or your wedding on a throw blanket, tote bag, etc, but they cost $100, which I couldn’t afford for an experiment. So I looked at eBay and found a “kit” for sale for $35. The kits are really just a code you use to upload an image to their website and a couple of weeks later a throw blanket arrived at my house. 

Was it perfect? No. Did it blow my mind anyway? Hell’s yeah. So to make it perfect, I decided to embroider the bits it needed. And then I decided it needed a bunch of lace and applique and flowers and more, more, more. And I became an eBay shark and bought every one I could for less than $50. Some of them really didn’t work and they became the ones I experiment on that no one sees, and the ones that do work, well, you’ve seen them!

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How long does it take from concept to completion or an erotic artwork?

It totally depends on the piece. Some pieces I work on for a year, others take just a few weeks. None of them are fast, I’ll admit that. I usually have several going at the same time so that if I get bored of working on one, I’ve got options for what media I want to play with today. And in addition to that, I’ve always got a bunch of experiments going. Right now, I’m trying my hand at needle lace (much easier than bobbin lace!), stained glass, beaded rocks (a series I’m calling Not For Throwing At People Rocks that started as a way to manage my anger during the pandemic), and creating sculptures out of pastel (powdered pigment and a gum binder). 

I hear you currently work with your childhood heroine. This sounds incredibly exciting! Please tell me more!

OMG! Ok. So. I need to update my bio because at the beginning of 2023, I transitioned away from working with my childhood heroine, not because of her or me, but because I also teach drawing at a couple of colleges and she needed more in-person time that I could do with my schedule. But for real, I was Wonder Woman’s personal assistant. Go ahead read that twice and giggle with me. She is amazing and beyond caring and nice, and everything that 3-year-old hopes that their idol really is in real life. I feel so honored to have gotten a chance to be a part of her team and get to know Lynda Carter. It’s actually the first “day job” I’ve ever left that I miss (no insult to any of my other day jobs, I love you guys too, just not as much as Wonder Woman).

We're hellbent on elevating sexual expression. What does freedom of sexual expression look like to you?

It looks like everything I can and can’t imagine. It looks like joy and happiness and no judgement and sunshine and sparkles and lots of cum. I suspect it’s heaven or utopia or whatever you want call it. It looks like the absolute best!

And what does pleasure mean to you?

It means peace. Pleasure is that moment when all the loops and craziness in my head calms down and finally focuses on me instead of everything else. It’s the singular moment of self care, with no guilt on it being all about you for the morment. I admit to being a highly sexual person, but it wasn’t until my late 20s that I started to have orgasms with partners and really ENJOY sex and pleasure. And then it wasn’t until my late 30’s that I became selfish in sex and really started to insist on the drawing out of the pleasure of contact and being with someone else. I’m an expert at doing me, but I suspect for many of us it’s second nature and by your 40’s it’s all automatic pilot. So it’s all about finding the person, the thing, the place that releases those quiet endorphins without being able to get in your own way.

If you could invite any five people to dinner (living or past), who would they be? And what meal would you serve?

I love cooking and having dinner parties! 

In no particular order (except the first person):

Number One: David Bowie. Because David Bowie. Singer/Artist/Princess/Astronaut/Rockstar Extraordinaire. Everything I wanted to grow up and be.

Number Two: Douglas Adams. I grew up reading his books and living through them and I think he would be an excellent conversationalist at an absurd dinner of ghosts and eccentrics.

Number Three: Anäis Nin. I first read her short stories when I was about 6 or 7. She has had more impact on my art life than maybe even David Bowie. Maybe.

Number Four: William Dorsey Swann,” the Queen”, the first recorded Black Queen in the US. Born a slave in 1858, living in DC openly as a Queer person, and what “Drag Queen” is possibly named after. I would love to be able to show them how far their legacy has come and will hopefully go, no matter the current barricades. And that all the arrests and struggles they had have lasted in history and are inspiring Queer people still today. 

Number Five: I guess I should invite my spouse. Someone has gotta make sure everyone’s glass is full and the food is served on time. He’s quiet but amazing in so many ways, and I’ll be busy talking with all my guests.

But what to eat??? I am a totally contemporary chef, and it all depends on allergies and food preferences. Nowhere in my readings of this crew have I learned what they like or dislike to eat, much less what they are allergic to. So, it’s a dinner menu waiting to be created.