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