Me

I have so struggled to write the content for this website.  I have spent hours looking at other artists websites, writing copious notes, writing content from those notes, rewriting, and then dispatching it all to the rubbish bin.  Nothing sounded like me.  I despaired.  I just can’t write and have it sound like me.  Or should that be read like me.

 

Then a wise, creative artist and author, that I admire said, “tell a story”. 

 

Here goes…

 

I’m Catherine.  I grew up with the belief that I wasn’t artistic; common conception, I know.  I knitted, embroidered, sewed, it gave me a creative outlet, and I always followed the pattern.  My working career has been in administration, I’m good at it.  So good I devoted myself to my jobs.  After being made redundant a second time I learnt not to do that. 

 

In my late 40’s I was desperate to express myself creatively.  Eventually I went along to a night course called ‘Painting for the petrified’.  I learnt about mark making.  And I was off.  This led into what was going to be 6 months off work to do a foundation arts course.  This progressed into three part time jobs and a four-year fine arts degree, followed by a master’s in art therapy. 

 

Ta-dah, we arrive at today, with one full time admin job and having an absolute ball with all sorts of artistic expression in my art practice.

 

My Practice

 

Mark making is my forte, along with this I use repetition. I delight in finding random objects that can be incorporated in my work.  Ideas spark from observations of my immediate environment, it may be a form or a pattern that grabs my attention.  But nothing beats just starting – making a mark.

 

I find the blank page confronting, so my action is to apply colour in a fluid and uncontrollable way as possible.  This gives the freedom for organic forms and reactions to happen.  Then I interact with what is taking shape.  And I build from there.

 

I like to have multiple projects on the go, involving different media and methods of working.  This helps me break my self-imposed rule of I have of “I must finish one thing before I move on”.  To be able to let a piece sit while I work on another piece, or in a different medium can give my brain the space it needs to know what the next best step is.  I can move between messy play and structured production as I need.

 

Of course there are times where I haven’t really listened to what a piece wants and I struggle with it.  I usually abandon it in the naughty corner for a while, only for it to be dragged out later and re-worked.  This could be anything from building layers, or ripping it in two or three, to then join random pieces together, for it then to surprise and delight me in its new form.  But not in all cases, some just get trashed, worked beyond redemption.

 

I am a lover of collections; multiple fragments of life that create a whole that has a story to tell.  I think back to my childhood, and I can remember enjoying collecting things and saving them in a box.  I could sit and observe them, organise them in patterns that I saw, and then put them all back in their special storage, quietly content.

 

I sometimes despair that I’m just an artist jack of all trades and wonder how I am going concentrate or focus on a specific aspect of the techniques I have learnt.  I must remember the complete quote, which is very rarely written in full– “Jack of all trades master of none, though oftentimes’s better than master of one”.​