Cathy Weaver. local artist from Flint, MI is featured as our Artist of The Month. Cathy's art ranges from traditional pastels and water colors of angels and nature scenes to her reverse paintings on old window frames. Cathy belongs to the Swartz Creek Area Art Guild and her art can be viewed and purchased at many local art shows. I caught up with Cathy at the 2011 Arts and Authors Fair held at Kettering University on Oct 15-16.
     Cathy said she has enjoyed art ever since she was given her first box of pastel chalk when she was just a kid and her talent soon blossomed. As an adult, Cathy is fond of pastel drawing. Her work reflects her deep spirituality with depictions of angels and serene ocean settings. One I paticularly liked was an ocean wave that was in the form of a heavenly angel.
      "It's a God thing," Cathy is fond of saying. " It became apparent to me (as an adult) that I had to step away from the 'ME' thing and back to the 'GOD' thing," she smiled as she told me about some of the adversty that she had faced in life that brought her to where she is now and is very apparent in her artwork. Cathy's artwork can be seen on her website.
      Cathy explained that she was in a roll-over accident not long ago that "put me out of commission for some time." She explained that the accident and several other tribulating experiences led her to days of solid prayer and crying out to God for Him to "point her in the right direction" and she said she heard a voice as plain as day tell her, "take these talents that I have given you and help other people."
      Soon Cathy's vision became clear. She explained to me that she wanted to start a program to work with "at risk" kids, those who suffer from mental illness and emotional problems, especially bi-polar kids like her own son. She said she wanted to start an art gallery in some quaint little town and conduct workshops in the back of the gallery for these kids to use arts and crafts as therapy and "enrich their lives creatively with painting, clay sculpture, iron work sculpture and writing."
      She told me that, not long ago, she had tried to obtain non-profit status for a gallery and make her vision come true, but obstacles like lack of funding kept her dream, so far, unrealized. "When you're a single mom and every cent of your income goes toward medications, groceries and rent, it's hard to find the money to get started," she said, but her vision is stil clear and she enjoys sharing it.
     Cathy "re-purposes" things that she finds at The Salvation Army, flea markets and she even recycles things from the curb to create her unique artwork. She then showed me some of her artwork made out of old wine bottles and clay bathroom tiles. It was amazing to me that she could take unwanted "trash" and turn it into such beautiful art.
      Cathy also recycles old wooden window frames to create her "reverse artwork." Cathy explained that she finds old windows in the junk pile or people give them to her and she paints different scenes on them. I told her that I had a friend that could get her as many frames as she would ever need and she told me that her townhouse is already full of them and she has no more room to store them.
      "Reverse art is done in layers just like conventional painting," she explained. "An artist builds the painting one layer at a time. With reverse painting everything is backwords." She added that usually the last thing an artist does when painting, is sign their name to their artwork. When doing reverse painting on the back of an old window, that is the first thing she does. Check out Cathy's Blog and you will see the process step by step.
     One particular painting caught my interest. It was a double-paned window with a beautiful birch-wooded scene painted on it. She told me that the painting is entitled "The Forest For The Trees," which reminded me of the old saying about not seeing things clearly in life, "sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees." I looked a little more closely and noticed a small heart hanging on one of the tree limbs. I knew that the heart held some special meaning for Cathy. She told me, but I will keep that to myself.
      She took me through the ceative process of reverse painting and explained to me that she had been looking for another medium because she had become "burned out" doing pastels all the time. She told me that her dad had passed away last year and the time that she spent learning how to reverse paint was part of her healing process.
     "It's a God thing," she said again. "The first one that I did took me about ten hours to figure out how to paint in reverse." She added that it took her fifty hours to paint "Forest For The Trees." Time well spent in my opinion.
Cathy, originally from Ohio, works at Kettering University as a graphic artist in the Publications Department. She is a very talented artist and I look forward to seeing more of her art in the future.

From the back roads,

Tim



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