Cath Sheard Art

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  • Patea Freezing Works – Bare Bones IX


    Bare Bones IX

    In  my last post I talked about how I selected the colours for this series – a combination of the local light, the colours of our land and probably most importantly the colours that describe how I feel about the Freezing Works.

    I don’t normally work in such a high key palette but in working through Confident Colour, Nita Leland’s book, I realised that on many ways I prefer high key even though I tend to paint quite dark. I made a conscious decision to lighten up. It has been a tiring week and work, then this morning I got up and did  3 loads of washing and ironed 5 ambulance shirts, made our lunches, loaded the dishwasher etc then headed for my art room.

    Remember I said that the colours I am using are partly an expression of how I feel in my memory about the freezing works? Turns out they are also a reflection of who I am feeling at the time, which is no great surprise I guess. How do I know this. Because I painted for a couple of hours then roamed off to get a cold drink. When I came back to my art room – oh my goodness!

    This afternoon’s effort is dark and gloomy, despite using the same few tubes of colour as before. It is my use of them that has changed. Grey sky, gloomy buildings, dark shadowed land. Dreadful…so tomorrow it gets gessoed over and I start again.

    I did the only sensible thing I could do when I realised what I had done. I went into Mum’s room, where she was doing a crossword as always, and got into her bed for a nap in the sun (giving her strict instructions to wake me after 30 minutes). It’s amazing what a quick nap can do for your day. It’s funny, at the weekend I often have a wee nap on or in her bed while she reads or does the crosswords. Some of us never get over needing our Mum no matter how old we are…

    In the meantime, here is one I finished a couple of days ago now. It’s 16×16″ in acrylic on canvas and called Bare Bones IX. It’s for sale on my website here.

  • The works – thinking about colour

    After my last post Margaret made these comments “Coming from a place where the grayness of the days often sets the colour schemes I use in my own work, I find the vibrancy of colour in yours quite a contrast. I’d love to hear a little more about how you go about choosing your colour schemes. E.g., are the colours vibrant because of the emotionality you feel about the topic/place.? I love the boldness of the purple/ green combination.”  Thanks Margaret, it’s lovely to hear from you and know that you took time out to really look.

    I guess the first thing I’d say re the colours is they’re a reflection of where I live. A lot of New Zealand tourism marketing is based on slogans such as “100% pure” and certainly where I live that’s true. The air is very clean and clear and as a result colours are clear as well. Grass is green, the sly is blue, the cows are black and white or vivid iron oxide red.

    I think the colours are also a reflection of my feelings about the Freezing Works themselves, and where I live generally. Patea is a poor, rural, low socio-economic town that knows hard times personally. In some ways it is not always an easy community to live in. The derelict works are ugly, just as the closure was ugly. But I love both of them; the town and the ruins. Being raised here was good for me, coming back here almost 20 years ago now was also good for me. Living here gives me the chance to work full time, be an artist, publish a newspaper, care for Mum and still be happy – try that in the city!

    I am using what is, for me anyway, a limited colours selection – mainly to help tie the individual works together a bit more. Sitting on my desk I have Naples yellow, permanent green light, brilliant orange, transparent yellow, titanium white, phthalo blue (green), manganese blue, quinacridone magenta, permanent violet dark, quinacridone violet, ultramarine violet, and phthalo green (yellow). I chose this colour set, ok two sets really, after doing some of the colour exercises from Nita Leland’s Confident Colour book.

    It’s been interesting to try to explain a bit about the colours; I may end up coming back to this later on. In the meantime …the photos (taken at night wiht  aflash, so dodgy colour) this time show some of the detail from a painting I am working on at the moment. Hopefully you can see that there is a reasonable amount of texture going on. I like my marks to show, to leave traces of what I  have done and how I got there.

  • Patea Freezing Works paintings – Ruined II

    Here is the second in the series of works based on the derelict Patea Freezing Works. The works closed in 1982 and that closure had a huge impact on the town. I know from personal experience; my dad owned a grocery store and the closure changed Mum and Dad’s lives forever. They owned the building, as well as they actual business, and had always seen the property as their retirement plan – but of course after the closure the building was pretty much worthless. Many people walked away form their homes, others sold them for a few hundred dollars, while a few daring souls packed their bags and moved their houses with them.

    Time has moved on and the works have sat unused for 20 plus years. Time itself, and the work of vandals and copper thieves, has impacted on the structures and they had become quite unsafe. Then in February 2008 someone set fire to the works, but more on that in another post. The freezing works buildings are being demolished even as I type. The whole demolition process will take 6 months, and I’m taking photos throughout that time.

    Speaking of photos, my thanks to local photographer Phu Tran, whose work can be seen here. He has graciously agreed to let me use his freezing works images as reference material for some paintings. I am deeply grateful for his generosity, and in awe of his ability with a camera.

    This work, as with the previous one, is 16×16″ in acrylics on gallery wrap canvas. It is based on my memory of how the land and the buildings have combined over time as the buildings have eroded – they have become one, with the buildings sinking back into the earth, and the grasses and trees growing up through the ruins. Ruined II

  • Gratitude

    Every Christmas I give small gifts to the people who keep our rather complicated household running; Teresa who cleans for us, Mum’s weekday caregivers Wai and Carolyn, the staff at the  rest home Mum visits 2 days a week and who deliver a midday meal the other 3 weekdays, our fabulous doctors clinic, and the Hawera Hospital A&E and Hawera Hospital Inpatient’s Ward Doctors and staff.

    Yes, I know they are all ‘only doing their jobs’ but without some of them Mum would have died years ago now, and we would not be able to care for her at home. We just couldn’t, so I am immensely grateful. I give a range of gifts – this year A&E and the inpatient ward are getting (slightly late) a handmade gift box each with fancy coffee bags, fruit tea, butter shortbread, cashew nuts and a few chocolate truffles. And a card that says “never underestimate the difference you make in our lives” because I think in the hustle of the day-to-day they must sometimes lose sight of just how powerful what they do really is.

  • Patea Freezing Works paintings – Derelict XI

    A couple of months back I withdrew all my works from my website, Etsy etc while I thought long and hard about the direction my work was going. My intention was to come up with a body of work that sat well together, that I could show as a whole, and that all said “she painted it”. I took the advice of a good friend whose work and business ethic I admire, did lots of research, immersed my self in the subject and then got painting.

    And I am happy! I have done 6 works so far, with four more almost done. I set myself a standard size, a limited number of colours, and an overall style. It’s amazing how much freedom I have felt with those boundaries in place, because it lets me be very free in other ways but still know they will ‘hang together’.

    I think  for me there are two really pleasing outcomes from all this work. The first is that the works do all look like one person did them – I can see my own style in them. The second, and most important thing in a personal sense, is related to that. These feel far more true to what I really what to paint, and how I like to make marks, than all the works I have done in the last 18 months or so. I am not sure why this is, but I am glad it is.

    So, here is the first of the series. I’d love to hear what you think.

    Oh, and here’s where I am at with writing an artist statement to go with them: The Patea landscape, both seen and remembered, is the starting point for my current work, especially the derelict Freezing Works which is being dismantled even as I paint it. These works explore the boundary between reality and abstraction; the colours are an expression of my feelings about a place or a moment in time. The Freezing Works was a multi-layered environment, built over many years and in many geographic directions, and in the same way the paintings are layered with marks made by scraping, wiping, dripping and pushing the paint around until the surface matches the memory.Derelict XI