Catherine Hicks - Artist's Statement and Resume
I have done art all of my life.
Drawing, coloring, collaging, weaving, embroidery, needlepoint, knitting, quilting, blah blah blah... I just never called it art, or called myself an artist, because I didn't paint, and if art history has taught me anything, it was that you had to paint to be a bona fide artist.
Instead, I sewed, teaching myself the kinds of things that all creative people know: I learned about proportion and color, texture and translucence. I embraced my inner engineer, and learned to innovate my way out of the tight spots I had sewn myself into.
But the fact remained: I couldn't call myself an artist because I didn't paint.
At a crossroads when my kids entered college, I seized control of my own creative life and took up a serious self study of painting. I researched many artists, then picked the one who entered into his career late in life, painted quickly and prolifically, and, with only a rudimentary formal art education, willed himself into being an artist. For a year, I studied the life and work of Vincent Van Gogh, made 52 paintings based his works, and wrote a blog (http://vincentproject.blogspot.com/) about the experience. I used the blog to make myself accountable to a deadline, and I used Vincent to teach me how to paint, and how to think like an artist. I also examined the lives and work of many other artists, concluding that the kind of art that any person makes is entirely dependent upon the tools, materials and encouragement available to them at the time.
Since finishing the Vincent Project in late July, I have been thinking a lot about how I can push everything I know into my art.
It started with something that I didn't know. In early August, I went to a workshop on how to stretch my own canvases, which I had never done before. As I listened to the demonstration, it was all incredibly familiar, because I realized that I already done this dozens of times, covering and recovering my dining room chairs.
As I watched the stretching, stapling and cutting, what interested me was this important thought: what could I, with a needle, thread and scissors, add to the tradition of embellished (painted) fabric (canvas, linen) stretched over a frame and hung on a wall?
For me, this was both a radical and inevitable idea.
I made a number of very sculptural "sewn" linen paintings; some of which I liked, ("The White Hole") and some of which ended up on my "bone pile." I learned that there is a lot of potentially usable space both in air in front of the surface of my painting, as well as in the area between the picture plane and the wall that the canvas hangs on.
This led me to spend a lot of time deconstructing linen, which then led me to think about how fabric is made, the raw materials, the warp and the weft, and the women (artists? artisans? humans?) who traditionally were the weavers.
I also kept thinking a lot about fabric, and the supports like silk and velvet that had fallen out of fashion with artists.
So I purchased some silk fabric and ribbon to play with. I experimented with with silk dyes on the fabric, but found that the "paintings" I was making looked like nothing more than stretched silk scarves. I wanted something I had not seen before. I cut the ribbon into lengths, and (using the same silk dye) I created an action painting rendered on neat rows of the ribbon laid out on my kitchen counter. I then recombined and wove a fractured, ribbon painting ("Glide,") in which hundreds of shimmering miniature images danced side by side. On later paintings using this same technique, ("For Claude," and "Before the Deluge") I varied the weave and size of the ribbons, and added painted elements before building the paintings.
There was a lot of experimentation, of course, particularly in the finishing of these woven paintings. I added innovations like padded stretcher bars, and finished my pieces in a craftsmanlike way by hand stitching a long length of dyed ribbon to create a wrapped edge around the perimeter of my canvases.
That ribbon project led me to experiment with gesso and acrylic on some grosgrain ribbon, which I then sculpted and sewed onto a canvas, held in place by silvery glass beads ("For WW, my own private Hisenberg" - placed in the 2013 Austin Artists at Work Show).
I continued in stretching the idea of "what is a fine art support, exactly?" by playing with velvets; first, with an acrylic painting in white and silver, ("Uncle Vanya, for Duncan") and then using iridescent opaque inks on black velvet ribbon ("The Redeye"), to create a fractured, woven action painting, embellished with beads and sequins.
In the meanwhile, I made a lot of other pieces; dimensional paintings with recessed boxes, sculptural, beaded "pincushions", a dimensional, sculpted "fish scales" painting, wired ribbon woven paintings, sewn dyed silk paintings ("Electric Glide," not submitted here - placed in 2013 Georgetown Art Hop) and "WWW," in which I used hollow tubes of dyed silk, copper wire, copper sequins, and glass beads to "paint" on a black velvet ground.
My studio is currently filled with boxes of new ribbon, organdy, rattail, horsehair, millinery wire paint, dyes, gold and silver leaf, silk charms, beads and other materials to play with, and my head and sketchbooks are just as full of ideas for how to use them. Since finishing the Vincent Project at the end of July 2013, I have completed well more than a dozen paintings, including four large scale works.
I have never written an artist's statement; I hope that I have included in this one the kinds of things you would like to know as you make your evaluation. My resume: I hold a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Houston (I did not take any art classes, as my parents would not allow such an "impractical" course of study), I have taken one drawing and two design courses from my local Community College, as well as two museum outreach courses in painting at Laguna Gloria in Austin. I have wandered in every fine art museum I could find anywhere that I have travelled, and I have read everything I could get my hands on about artists and the creation of art.
I make art every day, and I hope that you will consider my work as you evaluate artists for your competition. If you have any questions, or require any further information to consider my application, please feel free to contact me.
Thank you for the opportunity.
Catherine Hicks
