Warren, Catherine
"Bird II" Cyprès Collection, 2001-2002, Mixed Media, 38 x 38 inches (96.5 x 96.5 cm)
The rips and tears and slicing featured so subtly in Catharine Warren’s papier-collage paintings transfigure or indicate the central contours found in her recent series—Palms—suggestively in motion. It is Catharine’s strength of imagination and use of vibrant color that convincingly project the image and the idea of an image, which playfully unite to become a visual fact.
Born in Portland, Oregon; educated at Sarah Lawrence College, she studied with Friedl Dzubas, Ansei Uchima, and William Ruben and Barbara Rose. She has worked in Rome, Paris, Provence and New York, and now resides and works in Palm Beach, Florida.
An abbreviated list of galleries that have featured Catharine Warren’s work include Acquavella (Contemporary), Kouros and Zarre in New York, Galerie Hopkins in Paris and recently at the Mas de a Dame in Provence. She is represented in such corporate collections as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase; in the holdings of the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Albright-Knox Museum; and in many private collections.
In my Garden in Provence, whose southern border is made by the old Roman road to Aries, I have some towering blue cypresses clipped to look like columns harking monumentally back to Roman temples. The very girth of these particular trees gives them the air of having never moved at all, in all the millennia between. Yes motion – undulation – is one of the beauties of the cypress, a tree that the win of Provence takes care to keep ever-shimmering.
Edith Wharton somewhere in one of her great travel books calls cypresses “inevitable” and one day in the summer of 2001 I discovered that they were so for me as well – I just started to paint them, quite without having planned to. My natural “models” turned out to be endlessly transmutable – one moment showing a density almost opaque, and the next, a transparency in which they seem but shadows of themselves.
This series of cypresses was painted on paper and then collaged-on with more paper. Paper is a medium that I have used for many years: lighter than canvas, it has more movement. It is strong yet can easily be torn – like the cypress, it is fragile, yet it endures.
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