Here's what I've been working on....

Hi Everybody!

I wanted to catch you up on what I've been doing since I last blogged about art, art making and living a creative life.

So first, we go back to Christmas... for my friends up north, just look out your window at the ongoing snowmageddon; it won't be hard to think back to Christmas time.

Stocking for Amanda

In our family, the Christmas Stockings are kind of a big deal.  My son's girlfriend was visiting for Christmas, so I decided to make her a stocking.

I thought and thought about what I wanted to do, but was feeling very uninspired, until I remembered a painting that I had started (right) and then rejected because I had put in too many trees.

I thought it might make a perfect, wintery stocking, and the original painting was done at the same time and in a similar way to a painting I had done for Duncan [the boyfriend] (below).

Uncle Vanya, For Duncan

Stocking for Amanda detail

Hung and waiting for Santa

The footprints that you see tramping through the wood and spelling out her name - I imagined those were Duncan's...

It was a very merry Christmas!

After the Holidays, and inspired by the first polar vortex, I continued to explore the cool colors that seemed to be everywhere.  I decided to do a large silk painting using a very limited palette of grays, black, and deep blues.

The Sea of Tranquility 60 X 36 X 2

At left (and in the detail shots below) is "The Sea of Tranquility," an imposing painting rendered on silk ribbon.

I began with two action paintings on the silk, which were drip dyed then woven together in a stair step pattern.

Many of the paintings highlighted in this blog, including "The Sea of Tranquility" are currently available for sale; please contact me if you are interested.

The Sea of Tranquility in process

I wove and rewove this painting many times to get it just right.

That was a fun process, trying to figure out not only what kind of pattern I wanted to create with the ribbon, but also adjusting the layout to best take advantage of the individual "paintings" created by the weaving process.

Fortunately, silk always feels wonderful slipping through my fingers, so I honestly never mind reweaving my pieces.

The Sea of Tranquility (detail)

In spite of the constant forecast for wintry mix, I did use other colors (besides gray, blue and white) since my last posting.  Here are some examples:

www 22.5 X 14 X 3

www (at right) is made from formed copper wire covered with tubular action dyed silk, and embellished with copper disks and square glass beads.

 Before the Deluge (below) is silk with acrylic, exploring yet a different weaving pattern and the addition of tiny dots of acrylic to the surface before the weaving began.

Before the Deluge 40 X 25 X 2

The Red Eye 36 X 15 X 2

I wanted to keep on weaving, but I wanted to explore using a different kind of ribbon.  

I ordered some black velvet ribbon, and tried it with what I use on the silk.  It was awful.

Then, I experimented with my acrylic paints.  That was better, in a rather Elvis sort of way.  I liked the effects that I got with the iridescent paints, but they seemed too thick and sludgey to get the effect that I wanted.

After an hour or so at the art supply, I found something to try.  Thin, semi opaque iridescent inks.

Booyah!  But even after finishing the painting and weaving the ribbons, something was still missing.

So I looked around in my studio and found something that was wacky and strange and in that iridescent color family: a package of flat multicolor sequins.  With the addition of a bugle bead to anchor each sequin, I got the kind of space agey feeling I was going for.

The Red Eye (Detail)

From a distance, the painting, which shimmers as it catches the light, looks much like the view out of an airplane window as you whisk overhead; sitting, (as Louis CK puts it) "in a chair in a box in the sky..."

Unnamed Painting 32 X 14 X 1

I also have a few other works in progress.  

Unnamed #1 with ribbons

 In this one, I am playing with using additives to stiffen the ribbons so that they can be sculpted, molded and bent to my will.

I am still considering the background.

I very much like the effect of the interplay of colors of the ribbon in the detail below.

Unnamed Painting (detail)

In the next work in progress painting (below), I am playing with couching, and I am (again) trying to interject dimensionality to this conceptual piece.

White Velvet painting with Couched technique

The final image is of a mere detail of a large piece, which I am calling "Sequence."  Instead of focusing on curvilinear lines (as you see above), I wanted to keep this piece very straight.  My inspiration was my GPS "blue dot."  I was thinking about all of the intersecting lines on all of the virtual maps in any given city on any given day in any given moment.  Sometimes those people pass one another, sometimes they intersect, and sometimes their journeys are obtuse or parallel.   I am hoping this piece will provoke some thought about the road not taken, and the serendipitous twists of life that are no longer even explored.  

small detail of "Sequence" 40 X 40

And that sums up the end of December, January, and half of February.

Please let me know if you like this work, or hate this work, or even if you saw this work in the far reaches of the vast internet machine.

Thanks,  until next time.

Catherine

Catherine Hicks Artist's Statement

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

Catherine Hicks Paintings - Late summer, early autumn 2013

Here, in no particular order, are the paintings I have been working on.  I am interested in achieving a new and heretofore undiscovered dimensionality in my work, as well as pushing myself to challenge my own notion of what, exactly, is a "canvas?"  I am also interested in honoring the women who have come before me - never the artists, but always the artisans...  

Here is a small woven painting:

(group show selection)

An acrylic painting on "scaled" linen - like a carpet, it has a nap, which shows differently depending upon which way the scales are smoothed... not exactly a painting, nor a sculpture, it is an object which falls somewhere in between...

Here is a much larger woven painting:

 These woven paintings are initiated as Pollock painted, with his ground-breaking action paintings.  I take it a step further, though, by then fracturing the painting and weaving it back together, creating a picture plane filled with hundreds of frenetic, dynamic little paintings.

And now some paintings with "holes"

 Some of the holes are "innies,"  like this one on on linen, which is later shown painted....

 And some of the holes are "outies..." (also on linen)

 Above and at right is a different kind of woven painting... (also selected for a group show.)

Like writhing snakes, every surface is gessoed, painted, and comes slithering away from the canvas. It is both agitating and soothing, like an hour with Pandora.

And here is my painted hole.  Where does it go?

 Here is another piece that was selected for a group show - vibrant color which slides, dripping off the canvas.

And a cooler, larger fractured painting....

 Painted not after Monet, but rather inspired by what you get on google image when you search his "Water Lillies..."

 And here is a straight on silk painting; experimenting with brush work and dams to hold the color...

 There is nothing like the translucence of silk...





A colorful doodle.

Thanks for looking.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave some trace behind.

My brushes are busy, so there will be more to come.

Catherine