Catherine Young Bates R.C.A.

I draw and print into paint with a variety of tools, enjoying the sensual, directly applied pigments. The integration of drawing and painting has been a preoccupation for several years, a nd explains the use of pigment sticks as well as tube oil paints, and the recent reduction in the numbers of colours used. I also love movement, abstracted organization, and the Icarus myth, my symbol of environmental overreach. I am sometimes a “plein air” painter, not for the sake of the subject, but because I love to be outside.

To work from both memory and imagination, I often place myself at a distance from the subject so that it does not dictate to me. In the studio, subjects are references for intuited feeling. The marks of the working process are not gestures in the sense of autographs; I see the marks as already fused in the subject and I simply transmit them into newly created paintings/drawings. Imagery is retained even as the work becomes more abstract. I chart a course between minimalist order and intuitive expression, order coming from decisions about the theme and from the choice of media, expression coming from spontaneous work with the materials.

With the doomsday clock advancing because of environmental blunders and worldwide wars, I believe it is imperative to change, to work harder for a world of improved quality and dignity. Beauty, however one defines this complicated word in our complicated world, is a reality to create and celebrate; it gives us a shock of recognition. Beauty is not an evasion of current events and actually may be more of an antidote; nor is it an aim for transcendence, which has a long history in art; it is a way of being fully in the present, in the faith that there will continue to be a future. Aiming for beauty is a survival belief!

Catherine Young Bates, originaire de Windsor, en Ontario, se consacre complètement à la peinture depuis sa retraite de l’enseignement au Collège Dawson. Professeure, critique d’art, poète et peintre, elle a participé à de nombreuses expositions individuelles, notamment au Musée de Charlevoix (2007), à la Quimby Gallery, au Lyndon State College, au Vermont (2006), et à la galerie Warren G. Flowers (2004). La galerie d’art Stewart Hall de Pointe-Claire prépare une rétrospective itinérante de son œuvre pour 2008-2009.