Art Gives Rise to Art

White Rit by Vanessa German. American, 2013.

Carmen Pinart  1957, Barcelona, Spain paints with wood grain and a painted terrain across her textiles and hair.

Cathryn Kuhfeld (b 1957, Stafford, UK) tells:

"On my first day at school I was given a lump of red clay which I modelled into a baby in a cradle. I probably turned as red as the clay with embarrassment when I was singled out for attention by the teacher, who upon observing my efforts, proceeded to question me hard, asking me how and why. She then brought all the other teachers to look at it. I couldn’t explain how or why. I just ‘did’. And it continued thus.

I grew up in a very visual world where both my parents taught art. I was drawing and painting before I can remember and I absorbed and observed everything around me. When I was very small I watched my father teach painting and sculpture and my mother work with pupils, creating fabulous shadow puppets.

Growing up in this environment, art was always going to be my favourite and strongest subject at school. I was actually asked to leave maths lessons. At 15 I attended evening life classes at The Metropole Arts Centre in Folkestone, where I was taught by Fred Cuming, although at the time I had no idea who he was. This fostered my love of the nude which I have always enjoyed painting, having admired the works of Gauguin, Klimt and Schiele. Impatient to get going, I left school at 17 and spent several months painting the landscape before getting a place at Canterbury College of Art on its Foundation Course.

During these years at art school I took up print making, exploring etching, aquatint and lithography. It wasn’t until I went on to a Post-Graduate Course at the Royal Academy Schools in London that I tried wood engraving taught by Sarah van Niekerk."