#gailcatlin

Monday Mood Board: GAIL CATLIN

Above: Fragmentation of Man II, circa 1983, mixed media, 46 5/8 x 36 3/8 inches; Untitled, mixed media on mylar, 21 x 20 3/4 inches; Untitled, 1998, oil on paper, 7 x 8 1/2 inches; Untitled, mixed media and oil on paper and plastic film, 33 1/2 x 18 inches; Untitled, oil and mixed media on plexi torso, 56 x 35 1/2 inches; Untitled, 1982, 13 1/4 x 11 inches; Fragmentation of Man, 1981, mixed media, 38 1/2 x 41 inches. 

About the Artist

Gail Catlin was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in March 1948. She has recently started working with bronze, but made a name for herself in the South African art world with her liquid crystal paintings.

It is no exaggeration to say that Gail Catlin is the first, and possibly also the only, artist to use liquid crystal as the principal medium in her art. The question that begs an answer is: why would she choose to use such a difficult and elusive medium?

While Catlin lived at Arniston, she became fascinated, but also frustrated, by the nacreous quality of sea shells and mother-of-pearl, and was convinced that a new color spectrum needed to be developed to capture the subtle and ever-changing shades of Nature. She also realized that she was more fascinated by the color spectrum of the moon than of the sun.

She experimented with clays and resins and fiberglass, which played nicely with light, but only when used in sculptural form. She wanted to paint with materials that played with light. Her aim was no less than to capture the most elusive of nuances, the most intangible subtleties of n nature, but she was frustrated by the inadequacies of the traditional media of oil paint, acrylics and watercolor.

While at the Royal College of Art in London, she visited the Imperial College of Science, Technology & Medicine, and asked the boffins there how she could capture the pearly color of sea shells. They advised her to use a mirror to split white light into the color spectrum, as al-Haytham and Isaac Newton had done many years before.

But Catlin wasn't satisfied with this explanation. She made contact with a Dr. Cyril Hilsum at General Electric, who had co-invented the hologram, and was a world expert on liquid crystal; it was he who first introduced her to liquid crystal. Together, as student and mentor, they set off on a symbiotic journey of discovery, the results of which we see in Catlin’s work today.

Liquid crystal is something that, like Catlin’s art, hovers between two states, it exists somewhere between liquid and solid. Liquid crystal exist somewhere between a liquid and a solid, in the form of crystals in a watery medium. This effect was discovered over 150 years ago when Victorian scientists found that water containing myelin, a fatty substance that insulates nerve fibers, produces spectacular colors under some lighting conditions.

In 1888, an Austrian botanist Friedrich Reisnitzer, was examining the melting behaviour of a substance related to cholesterol, and identified a new kind of matter, which he called 'liquid crystal'. He found that, because the molecular forces producing these states are very weak, the alignment of the molecules can easily be altered by mechanical stress or by temperature changes. As the material becomes more or less crystalline, it reflects light in different ways.

Liquid crystal thus functions like a perfectly cut, faceted diamond, breaking white light up into the full spectrum of colors, and reflecting these colors with unrivalled brilliance and clarity. The beauty of liquid crystals, from an artist's point of view, is that they are infinitely flexible and fluid, and can be painted onto an artwork, It's like painting with liquid diamonds.

Later, in 1970, it was found that an electric current could also change the orientation of the crystals, and could make them either opaque or clear, which gave rise to the invention of LCD lights, which are commonly used in calculators, watches, laptops, etc.

Many other uses have also been found for liquid crystals, including the early detection of breast tumours, and the measurement of the temperatures of babies too young to use a mercury thermometer.

Through painstaking experimentation over many enormously frustrating years, both in England and South Africa, Catlin gradually began to master the fugitive alchemy of liquid crystals. She learned how to capture iridescence and lustre, as well as the changing diel and seasonal moods of landscapes and objects.

She began to paint with liquid crystals in such a way that she could anticipate their responses, to light, to temperature and to each other. A magical relationship developed between the artist and her medium, lying midway between predictable science and fickle art, but the process of discovery and understanding was still ongoing.

For many years Catlin produced mainly dark, nocturnal colors from the medium, and struggled to create the kind of lighter palette she needed to evoke her chosen terrain, the sun-baked African plain. She eventually resolved this problem, partly by accident (as all great discoveries are made), by painting on tippled, white paper. She sent a sample to Dr. Hilsum, who noted that the crystals rested at a slight angle towards each other and found that, the more you angle the crystals, the more you enhance their ability to reflect light in different directions. This produces a greater degree of optical shimmer and color contrast, with each crystal acting like a miniature prism.

The use of a white background also released a whole new spectrum of softer, lighter colors.

What Catlin has now achieved is quite extraordinary. As Fabbrizzio von Grebner has rightly stated, Catin's personal contribution to world art is that her works have achieved a kind of metastasis — the ability of the artwork to escape fixity and to constantly transform itself like a kaleidoscope. She has achieved this by simultaneously being an alchemist, scientist, magician and artist.

She has also, on an unprecedented scale, worked closely with some of the best scientists and technologists in the world in the field of liquid crystals in order to obtain a full understanding of her magical medium. She is probably also one of the first artists to venture into the realm of nanotechnology, the study and manipulation of materials at the molecular level.

Catlin has produced a unique body of work, not only in terms of her abstract imagery or dramatic chromatic effects, but also because of the lively responsiveness of her artworks to the viewer. 

Gail Catlin has possibly come closer than anyone to capturing the infinitely varied iridescence and color spectrum, not only of the pearl, but also of the African landscape. She has short-circuited millions of years of evolution and solved one of the secrets of Nature. 

Public Collections: South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Johannesburg Art Gallery; Pretoria Art Museum; Durban Art Gallery; Pietersburg Art Gallery; Stellenbosch University Collection; South African Reserve Bank Collection; South African Department of Education and Training, Pretoria; South African Reserve Bank, Pretoria; Public Library Collection, Cape Town; Good Hope Bank of South Africa, Cape Town; Royal College of Art, London; Pulitzer Collection, America; Standard Bank Collection, Johannesburg; Constitutional Court, Pretoria

National / International Collections

1979: Cape Town Biennial - South African National Gallery; 1981: South African Republic Day Festival - Durban; 1981: First Cape Town Triennial - South African National Gallery; 1985: 'Women Artist of South Africa' - South African National Gallery; 1989: South African Women Paper Exhibition; 1990: Standard Bank National Drawing Competition; 1991: Grand Prix International Des arts Plastiques - Nice (France)

Award winner for landscape category:

1993: Momentum Art - Biennial - South Africa; 1994: Grand Prix International Des arts Plastiques - Nice (France)

Award winner: