February: Cathie Joy Young & Kim Murton

Kim Murton is a ceramic artist. For this show she wanted to make BIG pieces and then decorate them with pattern and sgraffito. “I like the idea of taking simpler forms and then accenting the shapes with illustrated features. I draw everyday so incorporating 2D designs on a 3D shape is a fun design challenge. I start with sketches but I don’t follow them exactly allowing myself to make decisions as I work. I often see what influenced me after a piece is finished. In this case, working on this body of work started in November, it’s pretty clear that the results of the election seeped into my subconscious in the form of the “Big Scream” piece. I countered this with the “Lotus Head” to try and regain some balance. I am hoping that people experience both humor and outrage when viewing the work."  

Cathie Joy Young "Fugue" acrylic on wood panel Cathie Joy Young paints in acrylic on wood panels. “Figures and animals are symbolic in my work, and I feel like my imagery comes from borrowed memories remembered, not literally, but it is a way I explain it to myself. I’ve had an idea to paint imagined portraits of the ancestors I've uncovered thorough my genealogical research, but I am not organized enough to do so. However, the idea of this comes up now and again in these paintings, imagined ancestors and totems to those families I am, or may be, descended from. An echo is time travel. You make a sound in the present that you will hear in the future as the original sound you made becomes the past. My painting "Fugue" makes me think of music and echoes, visually and audibly, and reminds me how everything I do in art echoes something I've done with painting previously, or ideas I've immersed myself in, books I've read, and so on. So in that respect, my paintings have a long past, and a future, as long as they are seen.”