Catherine Meeks — What Is An Artist?
It was just over two years ago that I completed a two week artist residency at Chateau Orquevaux in the French countryside. One of my favourite people that I met there was a lovely painter called Catherine Meeks who I was instantly drawn to for her optimistic and sunny disposition. Her joie de vivre made her an absolute joy to be around, and our interview for my What Is An Artist series was one of my favourites because she’s so interesting and fun, and so easy to talk to. So much so that after we were done, I stuck around and we gossiped for a bit, and were totally busted by Beulah, the residency’s Art Director, who was in her office and could apparently hear every single word that we were saying!!! Oops!
What is an artist?
I think independence and creativity. Independence from opinions. Other people’s opinions. And I’m not independent, but I try to be. And I’m more independent than I was ten years ago. I care less than I used to. And with the creativity, it’s the confidence to do whatever you feel like doing, regardless.
And what makes Catherine an artist?
I know that I see things differently from people who are not artists. And I know artists who see the same thing I do; but not the general population. It’s people with a selective eye, who just see things differently. I mean, we can see the green out this window, the top of that hill. But what I see are the shapes of the branches of the trees and my brain is going, “Oh, that’s a… what do you call that tree? Oh, and that’s a pine tree over there. And that’s a this, and that’s a that.” And I point that out to other people and they say, “Are you crazy?” Also clouds. When I had a corporate job, we would get out at five o’clock and the engineers would stand out on the front steps, smoking cigarettes before they went home. And I would come out and I’d see these clouds, and they were all purple and yellow and pink and orange. And I’d say to these guys, “Look at those clouds!”, and they would just go, “Uh-huh, that’s the artist”. I was the only designer in the company and they just thought I was whacked. Because I came out and looked at the clouds. They came out and smoked, but I was the one who was whacked.
Some time ago, years ago, somebody said, if you’re wondering if you’re an artist or not, the thing to do is start saying “I’m an artist”. When people ask, what do you do, just say “I’m an artist”. Or you can say, “I have a full time job but I am an artist”. And you know, that kind of did it for me because I got accustomed to saying that and nobody reacted in any kind of negative way. They said, “Oh, okay”.
It feels kind of bold to say it though, doesn’t it?
The first few times it was very bold. I pretend I’m an artist. I just go with it. I’m an artist, I’m a skater, I’m a dancer. Other people aren’t scared to say things like that. Right?
Yeah, absolutely. And now you own it.
Yeah.
By the way, I love this middle piece, the chandelier. I can’t stop looking at it.
I’m going to do another one in that series, the chandeliers, because I liked doing it so much. I work on more than one piece at a time, partly because I need to wait for paint to dry, sometimes for a day or two, and sometimes I need to go over it in my head. I take a picture with my phone and then I have a little tiny image of it and I can look at it anytime and figure out what I’m going to do next.
You mentioned the other day that you can see things in that tiny little picture that you don’t see on the canvas?
Absolutely. Oh yeah. You know, I had this one hanging before I added the pink and I was thinking, “I’ve got to toss that, that’s so awful”. And I didn’t know why, just looking at the paper. But when I looked at it on my phone, I knew why it was dead. And I knew what I had to change to fix it.
So tell me about the chandelier series. What inspired you to start, and what makes you think that you have more to say about chandeliers?
There’s a Belgian painter that I follow who does a lot of chandeliers and glasses, and he’s currently doing lakes and ponds. So his current work looks just like what we have out there, out the window. So I feel connected to him, but the first time I saw his work, I was fascinated by these light fixtures in a dark room. And so, coming here, I feel free to try out what he’s doing. Nobody here is going to say, oh you’re copying Jan De Vliegher. Because it’s just a thing in my head. And he doesn’t do the separation of the two colours, like I do. He doesn’t do that. So mine is more abstract in that regard.
Are you painting from the chandeliers in the house?
Yeah.
That’s nice. So you have the subject matter in front of you. I really like the dark one.
I like the dark one too.
Do you normally work with dark colours? Because all the other ones are a little bit lighter.
You know, I used to work with dark colours. I do a calendar every year, of twelve paintings and I sell them in retail stores. And the owner of one of the stores looked through them and said, these are way too depressing, I’m not going to carry your calendar. And I looked through them and she was right, they were depressing. Later, I was on vacation at the beach in Massachusetts and I invited another painter I knew, a Californian woman, to come with me, and we went out painting together and we would paint the same subject. And because she was from a sunny place, hers were so happy. And mine in comparison, were just awful. Depressing.
Because of the colour?
Because I live in a colder climate, I don’t have sun 360 days a year. And I think that kind of affects your perspective, and the way you think, and maybe the way you paint. So I’ve been putting in an effort to go a little lighter and a little brighter. A little happier.
Does that feel natural?
Yeah, it does.
That’s interesting that you made a conscious decision to do that.
I had to. I felt like I had to, or I could go down this dark rabbit hole forever. I could do that. You know, I’m fascinated by the basement here, in the chateau. And I would paint that in a minute, ten years ago. But I’m not going to paint that now.
I’m so curious to see more of your dark, depressing work.
I love dark old places. I even love, it’s awful to say, bombed out buildings.
I do too. There is a beauty to them, I think.
Did you go into any of those old houses here? Avital and I went into one of the old houses, and it’s all rubble and old lumber and just crap. I love that stuff. I love the old windows and things that are falling apart.
I actually think there is a market for art like that.
You think? Look at that, I love this ceiling. It leaks but I love it.
Listen, I don’t want to give you advice or anything, but please don’t stray too far from what you love to paint.
I did a painting of some friends renovating an old building. They were in the basement and they had all this lumber lying around and it was new lumber, but the place was a mess and I did a painting of it and I sold it, almost immediately. I don’t know what it is. I’ve taken pictures in the Chateau basement, so it’s possible. I just have, you know, little pictures, but we’ll see. As long as there are other people around and a rat isn’t going to come out and bite me.
I actually like going down there by myself. I like to scare myself a little bit. Just a little frisson to start the day, haha. Okay, so have you had any classical training or are you self-taught? How did you acquire your skillset?
Mostly self-taught. When I was in art school everybody was doing conceptual art.
What is conceptual art?
Art that’s not really… it’s not a painting. It’s an idea.
Can you give me an example of conceptual art?
Christo’s art is conceptual, the wrapping of the structures and buildings. It’s an idea, a concept. For my project in conceptual art, I constructed a cardboard birthday cake and I frosted it, and for candles I put in these thin electrical light fibres. So it wasn’t totally conceptual, but that’s what my project was. So that’s what was going on when I was in school. Also the Vietnam war was going on and we were fighting for the end of that. And my art school was very, very involved in trying to stop the war.
Where did you go?
Massachusetts College of Art. Everybody was making t-shirts. Everybody was demonstrating. They changed the grading system to pass/fail. So you either showed up, or you failed. A lot of schools were doing that then. And a lot of schools were doing violent protests, but we were not. We were making things for marches, that kind of stuff. So I hate to say it, but school work was probably only half of what we were doing, because we were all very anti-war and it was huge, and the war ended not too long after I got out of school.
So the training, whatever you want to call it, I really got from looking at other people’s work. So I take their colour palette or their style of drawing or, you know, I just take something from it. Mainly illustrators because I majored in illustration. I loved illustration. I learned to read with a book that my parents had called “The Story Of Mankind” and the illustrations were done by Rockwell Kent. He did a lot of work in Maine, so there are a lot of small mountains and hilly areas and ocean. He made woodcuts. I was fascinated with the black and white thing. Fascinated. So from a really early age, it was illustration that attracted me. But now I have to work to avoid having a narrative in my paintings. Because that’s what an illustration is, it’s telling a story or it’s helping to tell a story, and I have to work hard to not do that. You know, if you asked me, what are you saying here with this painting? I’m not going there, because it’s a visual thing. So that’s been part of my self-training. Looking at a thing, and asking why do I love this? I love the illustration style, but I’m not going there.
Do you still illustrate?
Occasionally I do. I helped do a book last summer. A woman I went to college with had me do illustrations with a pepper in them, a green or a red pepper. That was the only information she gave me. She never told me what the book was going to be. So I did three different ones. I sent her the photographs last summer and she’s just now starting to work on the book and I still don’t know what it’s going to be. It was kind of fun. And the summer before I did a whole bunch of illustrations for a man who was doing a memoir, a pianist in New York City. And he was very cranky and fussy, but I got through the book and the work, and it was fun. It was fun when he wasn’t cranky.
How did you get that job?
Crazy, on Facebook! I got a message that said, Catherine, do you do black and white illustrations? If you’re an illustrator and you want to work, you say yes, no matter what the question is, right? So I said, yes I do. And it turns out she was working with this guy in New York and we connected, and I sent them some samples and they agreed to hire me for the project. I did it all in pen and ink. I drew them by hand because I can’t draw on a computer as well, and it was fun. And if there was a mistake, which there were, I could do a patch on another piece of paper and just glue it on.
Because you weren’t sending the actual piece, right? You were sending an image of it?
Right. So I had to do that several times. I had to do one drawing of a party, a social get-together with wealthy donors. So I did that and I had a little space on the page, so I put in a table with a vase of flowers and this guy said, “No cut flowers!! We don’t believe in cut flowers!!” Okay! I didn’t want to know why, but isn’t that funny? So I had to make a patch and I put something else there. It was the last thing I expected anybody to ever say, no cut flowers.
So tell me about a new project that you’d like to work on, something that you haven’t started yet. Do you have anything in mind, something brewing away or the seed of something planted?
You know, this trip is what’s been brewing away for quite a long time. I am having a show next winter so I have to think about that, but I haven’t thought about it yet. And it might be derived from these chandeliers. You know, most of my stuff derives from something else, and sometimes it’s just something I saw on Instagram or Pinterest.
So after you finish the painting you’re working on now, you don’t have any other plans?
I don’t. In preparation for this trip, I completely opened my mind. Made no decisions. Flying over here I had no idea what I would do. Because as you know, you have to be here, to experience this place. The photos are great, but until you’re here, it’s just photos. So no, I don’t have any plans. No plans. Am I the first person who’s said that to you?
Yeah, but you’re only the third person I’ve interviewed, so we’ll see what everyone else says. So what goals do you have for the future, then? You mentioned the upcoming show. What goals do you have for your career and for your art?
Well, now that you’re going to be my agent I want to possibly get into NFTs. You know, after we talked about that I started looking through my Pinterest board. And I changed one of the boards to digital drawings, because I have a lot of them. It’s very interesting to me, because some of the digital work that I’ve done, I actually like more than my paintings. So that is definitely something I want to look into. And I’m never going do an art fair again. Beulah was saying go to openings, but there are no openings. My local gallery doesn’t have openings.
Yeah, I think a lot has changed since the pandemic. And in the meantime this huge digital revolution in art has taken place.
Exactly.
Tell me about someone who inspires you artistically.
Well, I was just looking at Bonnard and Vuillard. Are you familiar with them? I think they lived at the same time. I love their work. I love John Singer Sargent, you’re familiar with him? I just love his work, his buildings. He did a lot of work in quarries. He painted the workers working in these quarries, and they’re full of light because the stones are limestone, light coloured and they reflect the sun. I love his work, love his work. And of course, you know, Monet and the usual suspects. But I do have my favourites. Vuillard and Bonnard painted home scenes; a woman making bread. And their work has a lot of pattern, like wallpaper pattern or tablecloth pattern. And sometimes they use many different patterns, and I love that. It’s not the way I paint right now, but I love it. The colours all work together and it’s dreamy for me.
And is there anyone in your real life that inspired you to paint or to become an artist?
You know, my sisters used to inspire me. They’re never going to see this, right?
Oh! I don’t know? Maybe!!
So Virginia is four years older than I am, and Jane is eight years older than I am. Virginia is an excellent artist. She could draw from a very tiny age. She used to be the best artist in the family. Now I am. I idolised her for a long time. She went to the same school I did, and she was a party girl. She was successful at school, you know, lots of artist friends and very social. And she met her husband there and she just had a very big life and I envied that because I was not that kid, I was not social. But I just loved her work.
And then she had some life changes and her work, suddenly to me, wasn’t as appealing. So she stopped being my idol. You know, she had kids, she and her husband split up. And her work was still beautiful. And she was very popular in Boulder, Colorado where she lived. Extremely popular. But I just started to not think that she was the greatest thing in the world anymore. And I’m sorry. I was sorry to hear that they broke up. It wasn’t her fault, but it just kind of changed, and it was like, oh, maybe she doesn’t need to be my idol anymore.
Maybe it you that changed?
It probably was, because I started to see reality. Yeah, she stopped being my idol. I don’t have an idol now. My older sister, Jane, copied my work. Jane and I travelled together in France and Italy. And she would paint the same thing that I painted, and people noticed it. My other sister and my nieces would say to me, you know, she’s trying to copy you. And she did not finish college because she left early to get married. And she really missed out on a lot of the training that she would’ve gotten, like learning how to think. That’s one of the major things you get in that education. So her style isn’t like mine at all. But she was copying the same things that I was painting.
Deliberately or unconsciously?
I never addressed it, I was never going to ask her. Virginia mentioned it many times, but I didn’t want to go there. No need to start anything with your sibling. And I think part of it was that she didn’t have the education. And she sells work. She does watercolours and people buy them and you know, it’s okay. She doesn’t copy me anymore. And I told you about my calendar, right? She asked me if she could do a calendar, if I would mind. And I said, yes, I would mind. So she didn’t do it. I finally got up the nerve to say no.
Wow, super interesting. Because of the previous copying?
Partly. And partly because it’s my idea. Isn’t that funny? So she does paint Christmas ornaments. She paints lighthouses on them and they’re adorable and people snap them up and she paints on sea shells. And people snap those up too. Because she lives near the ocean and there are a lot of tourists and they’re like oh, this is wonderful, this is a nice memory of our vacation. That’s fine. That’s fine. That’s her thing. She’s found her thing.
What advice would you give to yourself when you were first starting out, with all the knowledge that you have now and also what advice would you give to another new artist? And would the advice be different?
No, I think the advice is the same, and it’s the advice I tried to give my students when I taught. Push any button. Try even the stupidest thing. Try anything. Go all over the place. It doesn’t matter. If you hate it, tear it up. That’s the advice I give. And my students refused. We were working on a computer with Adobe Illustrator. They were like, how do I…? And I would say, try pushing a button. And they wouldn’t do it. They wouldn’t try anything.
Out of fear?
I think so. And they wanted me to tell them every single step. You know how I learned? I taught myself everything. I never went to school to learn Illustrator. I tried things out, and sometimes it crashed the computer, but so what. That is my advice to any artist. Try stuff out. Right? Close your eyes and paint. Paint with your other hand. All those things. Challenge yourself. Even if you have no idea where it’s going. Especially if you have no idea where it’s going.
That’s great advice. I love that.
Do you do that?
Do I push myself?
Yeah.
I’m here.
Push the button
Yeah.
This was kind of a push.
Yeah. Me too. Big time. I’m not great at meeting new people.
Neither am I.
You seem so at ease.
Well, I’m working at it.
Yeah, me too. And I’m feeling more and more at ease as time goes past.
It is hard. I envisioned myself, and I think my husband envisioned me, staying in my room the whole time.
Oh really?
If I lived where Christine lives, in the gatehouse, I would never leave. So it’s good that I’m here, in the chateau, because you kind of have to do the work.
I actually applied for the gatehouse and they told me I could have it. And then I turned up and I didn’t have it. And I was a little upset about it. But now I’m really glad that I didn’t get it. I’m glad to be in here, in the Chateau.
I know. Marcie and I were going to have the house where Charles and Jonny are living. And we looked at it yesterday, and it is beautiful, and they have a kitchen, they have a microwave and a coffee maker. We were going to have it until a week before we got here. And I’m glad that I’m here in the Chateau too, because it’s so charming. The boys’ house is fabulous, but this is charming.
Oh yeah, I’d never leave. I’d write all day, and come here, to the Chateau, for dinner and then I’d leave and go back to my cosy little house.
I would probably do little drawings in my little watercolour book.
And we’re more involved living here. You feel more involved.
Whether you want to be or not.
Beulah shouts out, laughing, “You two are hilarious!”
Oh shit!!
Oh whaaaat??!
The interview is brought to an abrupt end with awkward peals of laughter.
