Category: Artwork

I rediscovered my love of art when I was 38 years old. The spark was a class facilitated by Erica Ross called “Create Your Own Healing Deck” at Sheena’s Place in 2007. By the end of the course, I had created more than a dozen cards that contained encouraging words and images to address my struggles with emotional eating.

My collages were exhibited at Sheena’s Annual Art Show (2007 and 2008), and I continued to attend classes there, including Erica’s “Dance Our Way Home” and Ellen Jaffe’s “Writing Your Way.” The prose-poem that accompanies Ruined Barn in this exhibit emerged from a writing exercise in which Ellen asked us to imagine ourselves as a landscape. Barn Memory wrote itself in a white-water rush, a lament for past and current losses:

I am a ruined barn, empty but smelling of ancient hay. I sit in a lost valley, no longer a shelter nor part of a living farm. I used to be warmer, to glow orange from lanterns on February mornings, to retain animal heat. Now my shadows fill in their outlines, random headlight baths from the highway my only relief.

All my sounds are whispers and echoes now, where once I heard grunts, shouts, whinnies, cries of pain and hunger. It’s so quiet now. Ruin is quiet . . . . I miss being whole. I miss being real. I miss the animals I used to protect.

Barn Memory and the collage that illustrates it are the “grief-seeds” (Rumi) at the root of Maps of Loss: Rivers, Ruins, and Grief. Even though I made the encaustic painting Inner Map: Non-Political three years after I wrote the barn piece, there is a living connection between these two inner landscapes and the eight other works of art you see at Richview Library today.

Maps of Loss has helped me articulate grief and map it visually, divining underground rivers of emotion that I had not detected beneath the surface. This personal excavation has revealed unexpected artifacts, including a Trippy Pier to Nowhere, a Heron and Ladder, a woman alone in a purple bed, and rivers (Tidal River and Encaustic River Beast). These unearthed souvenirs of my psyche speak to mystery, solitude, and a sense of moorings washed away.

In July 2010, my childhood friend Jenny died of cancer at age 41. On the day she died, I went to the Picture Collection at the Toronto Reference Library to look for meadows and the flowers she loved. I felt connected to Jenny when I pored over a folder containing peaceful scenes from nature. And when I memorialized my friend in Jenny’s Purple Iris, I used her favorite flower to create an organic gown, a vision of peace in her body after the suffering ended.

In the fall of 2010, I distracted myself with a continuing education course in encaustic painting at the Ontario College of Art and Design. I learned how to melt wax to create tactile pieces that smelled of beeswax, and the three encaustic paintings in Maps of Loss come from my time at OCAD. Two of these pieces contain rivers, which reflects one of my earliest influences. Having grown up near the banks of the Missouri River, rivers mean home, time passing, movement, and change. They also represent uncensored feelings: unpredictable, fierce, embodying invisible currents and the wild mystery of eddies.

The remaining two pieces, Lenin;s Mosaic and When Ruins Swoon, flow back to the beginning, connecting me to Ruined Barn. The central photographs in both collages depict ruined houses in the former Soviet Union that have partially returned to nature after nuclear disaster.

These images of Cold War wreckage haunt me because my father’s health was also ruined by this war. When he was in the United States Navy in the late 1950’s, he witnessed atomic blasts in the Pacific Ocean as part of a testing program during the nuclear arms race. From his post on Midway Island, he and his naval comrades watched the blasts without any protective gear, and the cancers he later developed correspond to cancers caused by radiation exposure. He died in 1995 at the age of 58. (Jenny promised to give him a hug for me).

A ruined barn, house, or room can symbolize a body stricken by illness, once vital but now a husk. Ruins also represent loss, mortality, and history; they are relics of forgotten worlds. Like rivers, they testify to the inescapable passage of time. Like maps, they locate a particular loss in a specific time and place. They are both tangible and abstract, accessible and remote.

To add an element of hope to the ruins, I have enveloped them in mosaics that suggest new colour and growth. Thank you for taking part in my own artistic growth by viewing Maps of Loss. Your presence helps me answer Rumi’s question: “Where will you plant your grief-seeds?” (Illuminated Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks)

Apparently, I haven’t quite exhausted my bookmark energy. Three more of them were waiting to manifest themselves!

“I Like This Face” by Catherine Raine, 2011

I started making this collage on Mother’s Day a couple of weekends ago. Mom had sent me the black and white image in the center of the butterfly a few years back, and near the top of the head she had written “I like this face!” in her distinctive handwriting. (It may be a little difficult to make out the words from this photograph).

Mom has an endearing habit of sending me articles she thinks I might enjoy or find useful for art projects. I’m very lucky to have such a thoughtful, creative, and quirky mother!

With lots of scraps on my collage table and extra blank strips of cardboard, I felt compelled to make more bookmarks!

 

It’s the last day of the Toronto Public Library’s Keep Toronto Reading month, and here’s the final installment of bookmarks to see off April. I hope you like the color combinations!

The bookmark series continues, and this time it’s all about purple and pink. I’d like to dedicate the purple ones to the memory of my artistic friend Jenny.

The bookmarks keep coming, this time in warm colors. Before the mini-collages disperse to various friends and colleagues, I’d like to record their images here.

Lately I’ve been enjoying a relaxation technique called Make a Lot of Bookmarks and Give Them Away! I hope you enjoy the green bookmark collection.

More bookmark images will follow this post in yellow, orange, red, pink, purple, and blue!

For the past few days I’ve been in the mood to make bookmarks. I’m planning to give them as gifts, so I’d like to present them here before they go on their way.

What books will they eventually inhabit, I wonder?

I started “Theater of the Bosom” on the train from Montreal to Quebec City about a month ago. While I was lounging in my seat, I stitched the fingers of a fuzzy glove between the buttons of the apricot shirt. I also sewed together a couple of swatches of floral and camouflage fabric.

“Theater of the Bosom” by Catherine Raine, 2011

When I returned home to Toronto, I covered a small canvas with the fabric patchwork (plus glove-n-shirt) and added more fabric. Then I took an old sports bra and dressed the canvas with it.

“Theater of the Bosom,” Catherine Raine, 2011

I thought the bra-stuffing turned out nicely, so I may as well reveal the secret to a perfect fabric silhouette: shoulder pads, pantyhose, and bits of a shirt.

For theatrical embellishments, I draped a scrap of the camouflage material (originally a bandana that my friend Noreia bought at the dollar store) and added another glove, a ribbon, more fabric scraps, and some felt.

I used stencils and fabric paint to write on the bra. Later, I dabbed small blobs of purple encaustic wax over the dried paint.

“Theater of the Bosom” by Catherine Raine, 2011

I hope that “Theater of the Bosom” will serve as a playful reminder to respect the beauty of the female form, no matter what shape, age, or dramatic dimension!

In March 2011, my friend Ellen Jaffe and I facilitated an art workshop called “Collage Your Animal Spirit Guide” at Fermata’s Music Therapy Centre in Hamilton. Using the animal oracle deck pictured above, each of the participants selected a card without looking at the illustrated side. Then we took turns reading the teachings of the animals whose cards we’d chosen.

My animal guide for the day was the otter. According to Carr-Gomm’s explanatory booklet, otter “invites us to play, to ‘go with the flow’ of life and experience — to become a child again” (32).

Trying to capture the idea of flow and movement, I found some swirling fish and active grasses. For playfulness, I gave the otters and their fish friend some red flower hats.

And that’s the story of how the Flower-Hatted Otters came to be!

“Blanket Dam” by Catherine Raine, 2011

By nature, collage-making leaves a lot of paper scraps. While looking at the scraps and a long section of cardboard cut from “Blanket Dam” I thought, “Why not make a bookmark?”

“Candy Jungle” by Catherine Raine, 2011

“Garden for Grandma Raine” by Catherine Raine, 2011

When I first posted a picture of “Mary’s Lost and Found,” I thought the piece was finished. However, the more I looked at it, something didn’t seem quite right. I was bothered by the heaviness of the fuzzy paper at the top, so I trimmed and shaped the top of the piece.

“Mary’s Lost and Found” by Catherine Raine, 2011

For comparative purposes, here’s the earlier version:“Mary’s Lost and Found” by Catherine Raine, 2011

The other evening I was marking a pile of 21 quizzes about sentence structure, and I reached a point where I had to run upstairs and make a collage! I couldn’t face another quiz.

The icon figures come from a brochure about the Black Madonna. Other materials include handmade paper and wax. I was especially taken with the way the purple wax became blue-purple when it came into contact with the blue paper. Magic!

“Mary’s Lost and Found” by Catherine Raine, 2011

It was fun making “Mary’s Lost and Found,” and afterwards my brain felt refreshed enough to grade more quizzes.

Although I’m not the world’s best seamstress, I enjoyed sewing and gluing this textile piece.

Patchwork Pillow by Catherine Raine, 2011

Materials used for the pillow included: small canvas, fabric, felt, fabric glue, needle, and thread.

Patchwork Pillow by Catherine Raine, 2011

Patchwork Pillow by Catherine Raine, 2011

When my mom came for a visit in 2012, there was a lot of artwork show and tell. (I’ve never outgrown it). When I showed her the pillow piece, she said, “This could be a vertical pillow. If you feel tired, you lean your head against the pillow on the wall. It could be called a ‘sinking spot’ and it picks you up like a brief nap.”

“Invitation” by Catherine Raine, 2009

In an earlier incarnation, this collage was a folded cardboard envelope that contained an Oxfam gift. My plan was to fold it together as previously, but once the glue and fuzzy paper came on the scene, the envelope wouldn’t bend easily. Perhaps “Invitation” was destined to be stretched out like a diver poised for a refreshing plunge.

“Invitation” by Catherine Raine, 2009

“Invitation” by Catherine Raine, 2009

“Invitation” by Catherine Raine, 2009

“Invitation” by Catherine Raine, 2009

“Nightmare Tracks” by Catherine Raine, 2010

I wasn’t sure what I was doing with this piece. I had no plan, just a ladle and a desire to dollop wax on the substrate. Later, I added smaller blobs with a brush and applied fake-jewel stickers.

“Nightmare Tracks” by Catherine Raine, 2010

“Nightmare Tracks” by Catherine Raine, 2010