Cath Sheard Art

Blog

  • In front of the camera…


    Well I did it – I got in front of the camera instead of behind it. Actually, I did the “holding the camera at arm’s length” thing! I took about 30 photos using the digital and then chose a couple I could cope with. Not too many chins, not too much of a frown…

    I printed a photo onto textured paper then painted a canvas and added layers of paper, stickers, metal etc. The cat is in the top left corner because there is usually at least one animal keeping me company while I work.

    The painted hand is pointing to my head because my hands get covered in paint while I work, and a lot of my work comes straight from my head. The words say “I love freedom” (freedom to paint, create, work hard, just be me) and “I love 2 create”.


    I also did a canvas using a copy of my first birthday photo. Dad took a photo of Mum giving me my first taste of lime fizzy drink – I pulled a face and they both laughed.

    I used the image of the baby wearing a crown because I didn’t want the overall effect to be too cutesy.

    I started to do some work using photos of Dad and I – but all it did was make me cry. It’s 15 years last week since Dad died and I guess the anniversary is more emotional than I had realised. In some ways it feels like yesterday, in other ways like forever. One of my mother’s friends said to me once that it is “selfish to mourn too long” but I’m happy to go on missing him for the rest of my life.

  • Experimenting…


    Well, I’m still working my way through a series of paintings on the sea. To move things along a bit, I decided to have a play with some different materials and techniques.

    I’ve had a play with glazes, dry brushing watercolours, scratching back into the paint, rubbing the paint on with a cloth…

    I’ve also been experimenting with how realistic an image needs to be before we “read” it as being the sea. I suspect the answer is “not very”!! Our minds are quite happy to go – oh yeah, that looks like the sea.

    I had hoped to paint from real life at the beach over the weekend, but it was so hot I couldn’t stand to leave the house. So I paid the bills, finished the paper we publish, chatted to Mum … and painted, painted, painted…

  • Water, water everywhere.

    I’m still obsessively painting my way through a series of work based on my memories of the sea and sunsets.

    Over the last week I’ve played with oil pastels, watercolour, alkyd oils, and acrylics. I’ve worked on pastel paper, white paper, black paper, cardboard…

    I particularly like this one, based on my recollection of the tide coming in around the rocks at Mana Bay, Patea.

    Today my main excitement was having to wash the kitten’s feet after she landed right in the middle of a very wet painting of the sea and then tried to run off with bright blue feet!! Luckily it was water based paint … but she certainly didn’t enjoy being dumped feet first in a basin of cold water!

  • Looking in the mirror…


    Really looking in the mirror can be a pretty scarey thing – so much of the time we unconsciously prepare ourselves before we look. We get the angle right, run our hand through our hair, perhaps tilt our head a particular way.

    But take all that away, and just look – at the colours, shadows, lines, shapes – and you start to see something quite different.

    A bit less familiar, and a whole lot less flattering.

    I’ve done a series of self portraits over the last week and I have to say this is the only one I’m prepared to put “out there” on publc view! Gives you an idea of what the others are like huh?

  • A revelation!


    I had a revelation – I was reading an article in Artist’s Palette called “Creating Memories” about Aussie artist Petrea Fellows.

    She works mainly in charcoal, ink and some watercolour to create works based on her recollections of landscapes. Many border on abstraction and she says she “interprets the landscape through memory”.

    I’ve been fascinated for ages now by the sky, especially at dusk, and the way it is changing as our weather alters. Mum and I both feel we are seeing new colours and cloud formations we never used to see. I think these are warnings in the sky about what is happening to our planet.

    But I hadn’t been able to make a connection between these feelings and my art. And now I have. Ever since I read the article, I’ve been using all kinds of media to put down my recollections of the evening sky as it is now, and as I remember it from the past – without feeling I have to make it “real”. It is *very* exciting and really liberating…