Catherine Mackey
After 15 years working and teaching within the field of interior architecture in London, England, Mackey moved to the States, put away her drawing board, and decided to paint. Mackey’s work is primarily about the visual urban experience. A resident of San Francisco, she can often be found wandering around the semi - industrial parts of the Bay Area. Her sketches and photos inform the paintings which then take shape in her studio. She explores incidents of inadvertent beauty, those not planned by architects but created by time, decay, and the intervention of individuals as seen in the collisions of paint, sign writing, posters, and graffiti. She considers a wall to be an architectural palimpsest. It records both the structural history of the building and the generations of people who have used it for advertising and self expression. The visual fragmentation of the urban environment has a strong influence on the artistic process evident in her recent multi-panel pieces. The wood panels on which she works receive many layers of paint, posters, or stencil work. Each panel is an impressionistic glimpse, one of many disconnected images picked up in a single moment of being in the city. The panels are developed with no agenda, no plan for their eventual positioning. Compositional consideration begins only when several panels are placed together on the studio floor and the “patchwork” starts to emerge. The individual panels, or glimpses, are brought together, joined both literally (with glue) and aesthetically (with overlapping visual gestures) to offer the viewer a story of a walk through the city.