Cait Willis (Seattle, WA)
Jenny Zwick and Sally Brock (Anti-Wallflowers), 2007
Acrylic on canvas

10”h x 10”w

“I work in acrylics on canvas employing a technique mostly seen in Grecian pottery called sgraffiti. This entails painting or glazing over a darker ground a lighter ground and then exposing the darker ground through the act of scratching or drawing into the surface. This creates a highly graphic line that is the armature of the rest of the picture. Using friends as subjects, and asking them what landscape they would be, helps to continue my interest in how people interact with their environment, and the landscape’s influence on how we perceive ourselves. I strive to get the nature of the life behind the gaze of my subjects. It is their character that informs the line and color.

Art Nouveau, Japanese woodblocks, fashion magazines, films of the French New Wave, Maxfield Parish colors, and 19th century fairy-tale illustrations are some of the influences on my work.

I am obsessed with linking the world of pop culture to the academic world. It is in the tension between the bright world of the painting’s surface and the larger underlying mechanisms of narrative that keeps me painting at a time when many say painting is dead. I believe that is just an idea for those that forgot that imagination creates endless possibilities.”

- Cait Willis