Merrill Watson in Conversation with Artist, Catherine Kurtz

Image of Catherine Kurtz.

A few weeks ago, I made the journey into London from the countryside to see the preliminary set up for artist Catherine Kurtz’s show, Pinned. It was meant to open on the 3rd of November at The Redfern Gallery in London.  Disappointingly, like most things, it was cancelled when the second lockdown was enacted. Rather than create a virtual show for Pinned, The Redfern has decided to stage the opening in 2021.

Considering Kurtz’s work, this is the right decision to make. Her work is the first I had seen in the flesh since the first lockdown began. I couldn't wait to see the elusive brushstroke so rarely seen on any webinars, online gallery spaces, and zoom presentations I had enjoyed, and sometimes endured, over the spring and early summer. I was grateful for the escapism of the online forum in the art world, but my visit to The Redfern was particularly special because I met Kurtz herself to learn about her latest work.

Kurtz’s paintings did not disappoint. Her delicate and masterful brushstrokes are a delight to behold after months of flat screens. The paintings themselves represent, not only in their mastery, but in their subject matter as well, an “expression of our universal vulnerability and mortal fragility.” One can sense emotion and care in every stroke she makes.

I sat down with Kurtz, eager to discuss the subject matter of the three bodies of work in her show, Torn, Pinned and Memento Mori, and how her work has evolved over the years.

Merrill Watson: Pinned is a show based on objects. Your previous shows at The Redfern, Pants, In My Shoes and Food|Sex|Fashion, also focused on objects. Can you tell me how you choose the subject matter for your paintings and what the significance of a single object is?

Catherine Kurtz: The paintings in those earlier shows are still lifes in one respect, but they are really about me thinking about issues around being a woman and the pressures I felt growing up female. It’s partly to do with my particular self, being very tall, being mixed race, and there being certain things that I couldn't manage but that I felt were expected. Some of this was specific to me, but I feel like it is also a universal female experience. I had a really strong need to examine some of the accoutrements of female success: sexiness, beauty, et cetera. For a variety of reasons, I took on the issue of desirability, what that comprises and how I felt I couldn't succeed at it.

The Shoes exhibition was done in the era of Sex in the City. Carrie Bradshaw was trotting around Manhattan in her Manolos. I couldn't [afford] those, much less wear them. I would tower over most men in six-inch heels; not a look I was comfortable with.

The culture I was immersed in was pressurised in particular ways for a female; some of which I am glad to see questioned and lifted now. Although, I am fully aware that other pressures remain or have increased. Food|Sex|Fashion stemmed from that. It was sexy underwear. It was shoes. It was all the roles women have to master, and not just those to do with appearance and desirability. Success in the domestic sphere is also expected, and very much so in terms of career. I felt this going to an academically [rigorous] school and growing up in a high-achieving family, and it wasn't just to do with gender. It was also to do with my individual, personal make up; what roles I might inhabit and what I [felt] I simply couldn’t. Gender coloured things a lot for me.

Then when I had children, I was horrified by the gendering of everything. The toys, the attitudes, the way you are meant to treat the baby, the interactions, how you speak to them, the immediate expectations put on the child by others. I was horrified by Ann Summers (a rather risqué lingerie shop which also offers sex toys) for example, in the middle of [our] main shopping street.  Not because I’m a prude, but because of how gendered it was, because of the messages it was giving my daughter and the expectations it would place on her, as well as the very different messages it was giving my son, and what expectations he might have of women.

He Said he Would Call, 2008, oil on board.

So, I went to Ann Summers, and bought a whole load of things, to paint… I wanted to look at them, to make a viewer really look at them, too. I did a painting of a Rampant Rabbit [sex toy] and of a whip with feathers on the end. I painted these things to make people consider the object in a different way or context. I wanted people to notice and they did; they sparked conversations…the funniest of which was related to me by my son. When asked in his prep school interview what his mum did for a living, he said:

‘She paints pants,’

‘Pants?’

‘Yes pants.’

After which boy and headmaster apparently dissolved into laughter.

MW: Pinned seems very different from all of that… Although it consists of still life paintings, it is much more subtle in its message.

CK: Yes, but this show, Pinned, grew out of all the previous shows. I had done that last show and taken things as far as I could. Buying the underwear from Ann Summers, fully realising I could not inhabit that clothing, I [had to ask myself], am I supposed to? Is my daughter supposed to? Why is the other half of the population not being asked to do this? I had taken it to a very literal point. After that show, I felt the statement had been made.

There was also a lovely storm of things that I was noticing. I was looking at other people’s work. I started to absorb more from work by Judy Chicago. Her quilts and the use of domestic ‘female’ media spoke to me directly and clearly from a serious yet lyrical place.

Judy Chicago, International Honor Quilt. Image source: University of Louisville.

At the same time, I’d been watching Grayson Perry; someone I felt was incredibly important and very interesting, working with pots. However, when I was at art school, I was very aware of the disjunct between crafts and fine arts. This was partly because I did some silversmithing with my dad. He and I used to visit craft shows together. This seemed to me to parallel the way people would regard supposedly female things and male things.

MW: You have been able to explore gender issues in your art, but did you ever feel they impacted your ability to be an artist in the first place?

CK: I am stubborn, and I have an unquenchable creative drive. But as someone who has always worked from life – at Chelsea School of Art I often had people come in and sit for me – I could sense being pushed towards being a painter of portraits. At the time it felt very reductive of me as an artist, a socially acceptable trap. I wanted to be free to sculpt, to scream, to create yellow triangles, whatever had meaning to me at a given moment. I immediately stopped working from people. I could tell I would be dismissed very quickly if I continued; not thought [of] seriously. In fact, in a tutorial around this time, in front of five other tutors, I was told not to paint myself. The precise phrase used was that I was “too even-featured to be a relevant subject.” It implied that despite the rich and important history of self-portraiture, my painting would not have worth. My looks and gender rendered me uninteresting. The point I am trying to make is that I had early training in how things might be reduced for me. I felt on the edges of a club that only, truly, valued the boys.

Anyone interested in this subject should read The Freelands Foundation (2019) report on the representation of female artists in Britain. Kate McMillan, the author, has done something extraordinary, making it clear how even now gender inequality in art is fact not theory. This year the report also includes stunning essays by Jennifer Higgie on the erasure of women from art history and Hettie Judah on the particular challenges of motherhood for artists.

Torn I, 2012, oil on board, 21.5cm x 17cm.

MW: What is the particular inspiration for your work, Torn?

CK: After Food|Sex|Fashion, which was very overt – and thinking about Grayson Perry and pots, tapestry, quilt making, and a broader approach to what could be included in art – I started thinking about samples. I wanted to abstract what I had been doing, to remove the literal bra, the literal high-heeled shoe, and to use samples, as women have always been the ones to collect samples, swatches, and colours. I wanted to think about how this world of fabric swatches was labelled a female world and yet each one told a story. In making art with them, I felt I could display roles we as women are meant to inhabit; be pretty, be sheer, be sexy, be tough, be soft. Everything could be told by a small piece of fabric. By abstracting it, I aimed to give the idea more space to breathe.

The series is called Torn because the pieces of fabric or leather are torn. They’re ripped in order to put them on a rusted nail to paint them. There is a brutality in it. I am skewering the pieces. I am leaving them there for observation. I am doing something very different with my swatches than building a nice domestic space.

The first piece I did (Torn) was pretty, very girl-like. I love that piece of fabric. It personifies the delicate, pretty, blonde English girl I was at school with; a fabric I felt I could never inhabit as my mixed-race, almost-six-foot-tall self. I grew up loving Georgia O’Keefe, a painter who inhabited a particular female visual language in a very clear way, with strength. I didn't want to want to paint a woman’s shape for the sake of it, so the shapes in this series shift and change. I am trying to show pain with the tearing, the skewering. I wanted to pin the fabric to arrest it and what it represents.

Torn II, 2013, oil on board, 21.5 x 17cm.

With the piece of leather (Torn II), which is deeply cool, I see the girl I wanted to be in school. It’s soft and supple, but it’s also dark and bold. [I try to] acknowledge the prettiness, the seductiveness, or the sexiness of the fabrics, while skewering them. There are some fabrics in the show that most obviously reference lingerie. I think where I have succeeded most in saying something in my painting of these fabrics, is when I have acknowledged there is a seductiveness, but at the same time said that I am troubled by this. I think that parallels women’s glossy magazines and a certain trussed up beauty; those images are something that did haunt my youth. It was impossible not to want to succeed at that and inhabit that kind of beauty and glossiness. Acknowledging something that is seductive and glossy [while] exposing its tears and skewering it, is what I want to say.

Also, the way I paint now grew out of a less rigorous way of painting. I think, hopefully, I am getting better with oil paint. This way of painting creates that glossiness that I wanted to inhabit but didn’t feel I could, and that has informed my aesthetic. There is a reference to the beauty of something quite contemporary, but I use very old techniques with oil and linseed. They are layered in glazes. They are as old as it gets. That augments my message well, I hope.

Pinned VII, 2020, oil on board, 21.5cm x 17cm.

MW: In the second part of your show, you have pinned objects again, but this time it is butterfly specimens. Can you explain the thought behind this?

CK: I am actually quite freaked out by these specimens. I’ve never wanted to own anything like that. I found the first butterflies in an antique shop in France, and they captivated me. They seemed to very strongly relate to what I am doing with the fabrics. The idea came from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by TS Elliot, which I read as I teenager and have carried inside me since. Early on in the poem, Elliot talks about being ‘formulated and wriggling on a pin.’ The image of being made a specimen of stuck with me; that is to make an assumption about you; to pin you; to limit and restrict you.

People’s assumptions limit, reduce, and can silence you. The butterflies are being kept for their beauty, quiet now, snuffed out. The history of female experience is one of being kept for our beauty and required to be silent…smothered. So, it seems to me that the butterfly specimen is almost the perfect image to stand in for the female past and present. In most of the paintings, seeing the pin is deliberate. I want people to notice the pin through the thorax.

When I started, there were moments when I doubted myself.  As a woman, painting the way I do, and painting pretty [things], made me fear that the work might be thought of as merely decorative. But by the act of painting, I am making a request of you to look at [these objects] again and consider what I am really saying by choosing to paint [them].

Memento Mori VII, 2017, Oil on board, 21.5cm x 17 cm.

MW: The third series of the exhibition delves further into mortality. Some people have been offended or appalled by the death of the animals seen in your series Memento Mori. You show a dead woodpecker and robin, among other creatures. How would you correct their misinterpretation of your work?

CK: This baby bird flew into the back of our house, and it died in front of my eyes. It was an agonising thing and I couldn't bear for the death of this beautiful being to go unrecognised. I couldn't let go of this tiny sweet [bird]. I kept it in the freezer until I was ready to paint it. The work is again conceptual, despite its realistic nature. I began to think about the history of art, and large classical paintings in which there is death. I also thought of how corpses were used for anatomy study. These birds, animals and bodies were often rendered with almost no reference to what is in fact death. In my paintings I have singled out the animals and not allowed them to get lost in a classical composition or muted colour scheme. I wanted to shine a light on mortality, to show that there is beauty in the vibrancy of creatures, even in death. With the robin, for example, I am acutely sensitive to the reality of the death of the robin. By painting it, it is my intention to give it respect, to show it reverence, to even give it a future. It has not died in vain. Memento Mori.

There is a range of mood in these pictures. Some are very alive, and some are very dead, such as the robin; that is accidental. It’s to do with the way that I position them, the light and the way the animal has ended up looking in death. There is a specific moment when the animal has died but is still vital. It is an impossible moment. It is one of the most painful and poignant things in existence; it is inevitability. I think that there is something incredibly beautiful still there, and yet death is inescapably tragic. There is no way to think about mortality that doesn't look tragedy in the face. I suppose in this work there is recognition of fear of death in myself, so I use my hand to keep them going – keep them here.

Painting has always been the most positive thing I do; the act of painting is being in love with what I am looking at. It is paying the object full attention. Painting is complete observation. Even while it is a ‘recording’, or a ‘keeping’, it is most fully being in the moment.

Thank you very much, Catherine. I can’t wait to see your show in 2021!

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Merrill Watson

Contributor, MADE IN BED