CATHERINE BEHRENT Artist Statement Solo Exhibition, Meredith Long & Co, 2014

PROSPECT (noun)
Prospect 1. Possibility 2. Vision of future 3. Extensive outlook or scene 4. Direction faced

“One black night in the south Atlantic Ocean, while steering a jury-rigged lifeboat from Elephant Island to South Georgia Island in gale winds and cross-seas, the Antarctic explorer Ernst Shackleton saw a white line so high against the southern horizon that he took it to be a clearing sky. It marked instead the foam of a cresting wave huge beyond any that he had ever met in his long years at sea. Meet it he did, headed his tiny craft into the wind and rode it out. “

From “Prospect, the Journal of an Artist”, by Anne Truitt

Like Mr. Shackleton and my mentor and friend, Anne Truitt, I, too, hoped that the sky was clearing and instead found myself lifted by a wave beyond anything I could have imagined. This body of work celebrates a short life, fully lived, honors and pays tribute to his courage, strength, love and joy – an ever-present source of inspiration for me. It constitutes a consideration of my experience as an artist, a mother, a teacher, and above all as a person reflecting on life lived and the nuances of nature and (the) human spirit. Father Time and Mother Nature are friends.

Flowerscelebrate,paytribute,honor,andrepresentloveandrespect. Inthiswork, they represent all of these, as well as relationships — personal relationships, color relationships, relationships of space and place, all woven together in memory, metaphor and regeneration.

In loving memory of my son, Christopher David Legg 1978-2003

DOMESTIC AND DANGEROUS

After a twenty-year career as an exhibiting artist, I began working to break apart the formulas of my work to use my skills in an investigative, risk-taking search for work more unpredictable, emotionally freighted and connected more to me and my life.

I grew up in a small, South Texas town, isolated and isolated, safe and simple. In that world my only art was the china, bric-a-brac and beautiful things collected by my mother, cherished and displayed in our home. I began to draw and paint these objects when I was 5 years old.

Those recognizable objects persist in my art, though they continually change. The objects are often charged with an emotional and psychological subtext. They become metaphors about isolation and connection, and the family’s strength and fragility, in a world reassuringly domestic, and dangerous.