Confession of a startled blogger and an 'About me'

OK, I'll be honest here. On a scale of 1 → Many many thousands, my techno savy brain cells number in the region of..let me see..um..2 and I've used both of them up getting my first post posted. I recognise that there are settings like 'About me' and 'how you might follow me' as I trail you around my studio. The trouble is that I don't seem to be able to find them. I know that there are oceans of helpful studious folk that have written all the answers I'll ever need, but going down that road with 3 weeks before my exhibition, is akin to going wingsuit gliding without a helmet. That would be - heading somewhere really, really fast in a manner in which really, really uncomfortable things are likely to happen.  I have also not activated Comments at this stage, but hope to as I become more familiar with the territory. So here is a little bit about me and it comes with a promise of rigorous efforts in Googleland sometime in the not too distant future.

The short and official version.

Cathryn Marinos was born and raised amongst a fruit orchard and gum trees in the Adelaide Hills. Years spent living in the beautiful landscape of Idaho's Rocky Mountains surrounded by an abundance of wilderness and its creatures, influences her work to this day and something of the quiet of the woods can be felt in her art. Today, she paints from her studio at home, in an historic village in the wine and cattle growing region of the Mt Lofty Ranges.

Now for the unofficial one.

I am one of 5 children, raised on a bush block where we ran around all day getting filthy, getting clean in the dam, getting filthy again and having a 5 kid bath at the end of the day in bore water dirtier than the dam. It was an amazing way to grow up. My father Nic was a biologist who studied alpine plants and we would set off as a family in various VW vans, summer and winter, to spend long wonderful weeks camping, exploring, swimming in rivers and growing strong in the high country of Victoria.

5 small children having lunch in the forests of the Buckland Valley, Victoria.

Art was always in my life. We had access to the two most important things a child with natural tendencies towards creativity needs. One was understanding that artistic endeavor was accepted as a meaningful pastime. The other, was ready access to reams of scrap paper, pencils, paint and room to spread ourselves out on the kitchen floor.

When I was a little older, I ran away to America to climb mountains, study Art and Outdoor Survival Education. There, I met a strappingly handsome Alaskan Lumberjack, Geology student, fell immediately in love, married and fell almost as immediately in child with the first of our two beautiful daughters. (Technically, I didn't fall in, I dove.)

I am mesmerised by the unexpected moments of contentment and wonder that this life holds, even in the darkest of times. I love colour and seeing beauty in ordinary things and am enormously grateful that art is a daily part of my life. Maybe the heart is healed by joy and so in my own small way, which is the only way I’ve got, I hope to mend a tiny portion of the world.

Thank you for listening,

Cathryn

A warm welcome to Cherry Red Gallery

I have had the privilege over the past few years, of working in a public studio where people could walk right into my workspace and see what was going on. It sparked many wonderful conversations about art, inspiration, life and the things that have meaning in our world. Now that I work from a home studio, my hope is that this blog will continue those precious conversations.

With an up and coming exhibition for August's SALA festival (South Australian Living Artists), I thought I might share some of what has been going on at my desk over the past months. I must say, that 'up and coming' at this stage, with only 25 more sleeps until the doors open, means ... coming up way too fast. Sigh. Though all the artwork is done and at the Art Lab for scanning, there is a wheelbarrow of job lists that now come to the front. For today though, I get to sit quietly in front of a large window, looking out at the last coloured leaves of Autumn and consider what you might enjoy.

This years body of work includes new paintings to add to existing series and a brand new collection called 'The Cat's House' Project, an over the fence glimpse of life in a cat village. The original idea was to paint 2 larger scenes that would work on their own and also as bookmarks, by slicing them into 3 separate sections. In addition to this, these 3 individual images needed to be painted again separately to accommodate the different proportions of my greeting card range. So - Two large scenes and six smaller ones, three per scene.

'A supremely busy day in the garden' is being drawn up on the lightbox.

I spend time getting the design correct on thin sketch paper, before transferring it to watercolour paper with a light-fast, archival ink pen. Before I do this though, I ink the original drawing to make it easier to see, especially on fine detail of this scale.

Have you ever tried to trace a design through paper whilst holding all the layers up against a window? A light box does exactly the same job but far, far more comfortably. I have taped the original down onto the light box glass with green masking tape (acid free and low tack), then secured the 300gsm watercolour paper over the top so neither sheet moves an iota. It took 16 hours to trace the 8 designs to paper. Yep! Imagine that leaning on a window.

I have a serious case of light-box love.

'A supremely busy day in the garden' inked up and ready for some colour.
You can see the entire scene at the top and underneath it, the 3 separate card images that come from it. From left to right - 'Emmaline's baking day', 'Mr Nic knocks' and 'Everyday is princess day'.

Emmaline and Mr Nic are almost done.

On a cold, cold morning in June before the winter sun comes over the hill, work is already drying on the windowsill.
Thank you for visiting,
Cathryn