cathie joy young
Nationality: US
Currently Living: Portland
Member Since: 3/24/2008
I am a painter living and working in Portland, Oregon. I also curate monthly art shows at Vino Paradiso Gallery and Wine Bar which helps support my painting habit. My paintings are acrylic with occasional ball point pen on wood panels. My work is figurative with an abstract sensibility. It is process oriented but not for the sake of process; rather this is how I get to the imagery. When it all comes together I tend to figure out where I was heading. The outcome is a visual story.
I am represented by Dezart One Gallery in Palm Springs, CA. and I show independently in Portland and Seattle.
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Cathie Joy Young utilizes a masterful command of color and composition with acrylic on wood panels to create modern, urban paintings with an oftentimes devotional quality to them. Although unmistakably current in appearance, the imagery often evokes a feeling of having come from long ago and far away. Figures, boats, structures, and animals recur in her paintings which at first appear whimsical, but look closer and the viewer may discover the depth and tension within these spectral images. The multiplicity of meanings implied in these works is reflected by the alternating techniques of glazing and scraping through the paint to reveal the layers below, adding to the surface texture and at times revealing what at some point in the process was hidden. These sensitive, complex works do not scream with narrative and emotion, rather they suggest by a whisper up close, inviting the viewer to come to a visual understanding.
WM. Vesneski
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Primal, atmospheric dreamscapes... Cathie Joy's paintings feel like directly transmitted dreams, almost like fairy tales or nursery rhymes, peaceful but discordant enough to be curious, to feel like inquiries or investigations of mystery. These paintings take me to the depths of some place where I want to stay...but a place which challenges me in some intangible way; they are worlds full of beauty, of change, of wonderment.
Erica Steiner
