Six years ago, I decided to paint. After having spent twenty years making installation work with black velvet tarpaulins,extract and sometimes time based projections, I was compelled to take what I had learned and what I had tried to express ABOUT the language of painting,back to paint.
I say back to because at onetime, I did paint.I kept one from 1984 that will be exhibited this summer in my "Under One Skin" exhibition in Muskoka.
At this same time, I had moved to the forest three hours north of Toronto and was able to have my dream studio built. So now what? I really had no idea how to begin,Curiously, I started to make small clay sculptures. In particular,I made alot of tiny vessels -tear catchers. I had seen some in the museum in Tiblisi once and they had always intrigued me. As I made them, I thought about tears and how in Fairy Tales it was the tears that were the catalyst for the magic - the hero lay dying and miraculously the tears of the maiden brought him back to life, or the princess lay comatose for years until the tears of the prince caused her to awake. I also thought alot about gravity and decided to use it to make some of my first marks on canvas.Using an eye dropper,and later a brush, I would drop the paint onto the surface and then lift the canvas so that the drop followed through with a line. I worked from all sides of the canvas, as I still do ,so that the lines were coming and going in different directions. Unwittingly, this constructed a post and lintel through which I could literally enter the canvas. From here, grids were formed out of mostly blues and blacks - two of the colours that I associate with space.There are alot of examples of this work on my website www.KateBrownArt.com
initially I thought,"O maybe this is my thing,this is my vocabulary",but as I continued to hone my listening skills to what a painting called for, it was clear that the the path was going to be long,not very well lit and the vocabulary extensive.
Tear Catchers:
