Today, as part of my 100 Days of Encouragement Project, I am celebrating the work of Cate Maddy, whose love of nature and Australian flora combine with her love of home to make paintings that quicken our hearts, stir our thoughts, and comfort our souls.
Early in her career, Cate interacted with her native Australian land via the urban experience of it. In those years, she worked from the reality of life in the city, capturing a longing for nature and a sense of disconnection. She described her landscapes as being scraped off the city walls, rubbed from the graffitied laneways, colored by technology, and the bits of nature that grew out of the cracks in the pavement. She exaggerated those glimpses in her early paintings to create her best imitation of the great Australian landscape tradition.
Today, Cate’s Melbourne home studio is surrounded by bushland, clearly inspiring her beautifully layered artworks. Her studio is full of the things that inspire her: vases of native flowers, collections of pebbles, bird nests, driftwood, house plants, paper lanterns, patterned rugs, anything Bohemian, and other objects that stir her sense of wonder. She is also assisted in her studio (hmmmmm…really?...would we actually call it assistance??) by her kittens, who are forever getting in the way and making her laugh.
Cate has always been interested in art. Her whole family is creative in different ways, and she was brought up to be curious about the world. She clearly remembers the satisfaction she felt in creating a collage of a rooster in first grade. While the other kids made their roosters out of about 5 pieces of paper, she used hundreds of tiny pieces of paper to construct a giant tail on hers. You can sense that feeling of collage in many of her works today.
She studied Graphic Art and worked in Advertising for 12 years before going back to study Visual Art at TAFE, followed by a Fine Art Degree at RMIT. While at university, she won the Siemens Award - a travel scholarship which she used to go on the RMIT Art Tour to New York. Last year, Cate was a finalist in the Kennedy Prize in Adelaide and spent a month studying painting in Venice.
She starts a work in acrylic paint, then builds up the layers with oil paint, aiming to create a sense of movement and variations of texture. Color inspires her – the endless variations and the emotional charges that colors hold. Native flowers and plants hold a particular appeal for her, though she is sometimes too awed by the beauty of a native flower to even attempt to paint it.
Cate is also inspired by Abstract Expressionism, abstraction, and Naïve painting. She likes the term expressionism for her artwork, because art is how she expresses herself in a physical way -- with big brushstrokes, bold color, harsh areas and soft moments. She describes her work as emotional and tumultuous, like life itself.
Cate observes that the underlying theme that runs through her works is relationships – between the people and the environment, between friends and families, between objects and their associations, between stillness and movement. She believes that we have relationships with everything in the world, so these connections are a rich creative source.
She is using the still life genre to creative ways to express some historical concepts. In the Vanitas tradition of the late Renaissance and early 17th century, still life paintings invited viewers to consider their relationships with natural and man-made things, emphasizing the fleeting nature of our existence, and the need to attend to what endures. In the strict moral code of the Reformation, still life artists used religious symbolism to promote spiritual repentance.
In Cate’s work, she wants to explore our broken relationship with the land we have been tasked with stewarding. The repentance she seeks to promote is awareness and responsibility for honoring and shielding the beauty and fragility of the environment we have inherited.
She has now exhibited in every major city in Australia, along with several Regional galleries, exhibited in London and sold work internationally. In addition, she acknowledges the value of connecting with people on Instagram. She has been surprised and humbled by the power of social media to create shared joys between people worldwide.
How You Can Be an Encouragement
Please check out Cate’s offerings on Instagram, follow her, and send her some encouragement today by commenting on one of her posts or sending her a direct message.
Instagram: @cate.a.maddy
Galleries:
