Kat's Paintings

I only intended to have one exhibition. It was one of the things on my Life List. You know, the things you want to do at least once in your life: write a book, record a song, live in another country for at least a year, fall in love, etc. Thanks to the wonderful Peri, I got the chance to have my first solo show, called "I've Come This Far With My Innocence Intact" and it sold very well. I was pretty happy and ready to cross "art exhibition" off my list.

A few weeks after the show, though, a guy came up to me on the street and said he owned one of my pieces. He said that any day he woke up feeling low or in a bad mood, he'd get up, make himself a cup of tea, look at my painting and... smile. He would forget he was in a bad mood, and the day would be off to a good start. I was so stunned. I painted these pictures to make myself happy, but I didn't expect that to rub off on other people. Making people smile might be a small thing, but it's something. So I kept painting for a couple of years until the web took over as my main form of creative expression.

Funnily enough, in my three or four years as an exhibiting artist, I did reasonably well. I still had to temp in between exhibitions to pay for my framing bills, but I sold about two hundred paintings which may still be hanging on the walls of strangers around the world.

It's no way to make a living though, unless you do corporate work and manage to take youself very seriously. As you might have guessed, I don't do either. My pictures are usually perky little things for kitchens and family rooms, not big, abstract conceptual works for office foyers.

I've recently returned to Art Skool and am studying toward my Diploma of Fine Art. Of course I have to do more serious art there, but I expect I'll always do some degree of perky paintings as long as some people like them enough to buy them!

Want to know about my technique, or send an art eCard from my alias Anya at ubermole.com (apologies for the ads when you send a card, but I can't host it myself). You might also want to see my Kids Books with similar perky paintings. If you want the formal blah (yawn) you can peruse my Art CV.

meow & ciao,

katty b
march 2003