I first met Cate years ago when everyone kept saying I
should meet the “other sculptor church lady”.
I was busy creating Sanctuary Arts in an 1850's Methodist
Church and a bit later, Cate was converting a Pentecostal Church in downtown
Portsmouth into her residence and sculpture studio. We eventually met and I was
very impressed by Cate's classically inspired figurative work. She began coming
to my classes to work from the figure model, and eventually began teaching here
as well. She met her husband, artist Carl Aichele here at Sanctuary Arts, and
they now have two beautiful children. We sometimes share working from models
and have developed a nice artistic friendship. I took the time to chat with Cate
about her upcoming class and her artistic roots.
I'm always fascinated with the details of an artist's
background- what is the path that took them from childhood scribblings to
substantial art careers? In Cate's case, her mom loved to cruise junkyards and
refurbish her finds as antiques. Cate spent her time sanding and painting old
trunks, creating beautiful objects. Falling in love with the painting aspect,
she nursed the idea of becoming a painter. After majoring in Art &
Anthropology at UVM, Cate worked at an upstate NY job working for a special
effects/ make-up artist who made manikins, sculpting the disemboweled policeman
for Silence of the Lambs.
She heard about the New York Academy of Art from friends she met at
Skowhegan and enrolled in the graduate school part time (she was working as a
fiduciary). Rollerblading was her transportation of choice to the school in
Tribeca and her studio. Wanting to be immersed in the program, she decided to take out a loan and began attending
full time. A sculpture class was a requirements (and one Cate didn’t like). But
showing lots of potential, the chairman of the sculpture department, Harvey
Citron, who had a studio across from hers in Tribeca, eventually talked her
into changing her major and never looked back.
Cate
learned her anatomical drawing skills at the New York Academy, a
recreation of the French Academy of the 19th Century and the perfect
place for her desire to acquire classical training in the figure. Like most of
us, she lacked the discipline to study drawing on her own and needed the
structure of school to push her to draw intensively. There, she learned tricks
that aren't in the books. She learned from professors who observed how “Old
Masters” drawings were created, studying things like line, hatching, and the
tone of the paper. Cate says that drawing helped her sculpture skills
enormously. Students endlessly copied plaster casts, drawing and painting tonal
studies. She studied surface anatomy, working from cadavers and plaster casts
of cadavers, creating ecorche' figures (skeletons with an overlay of surface
muscles) until she really knew anatomical structure.
Cate's Anatomical Drawing class will be a fertile
combination of Old Master and Anatomical observational studies. The class will
be looking extensively at Old Master Drawings, teasing out their secrets for
students to understand and build on. Their drawings can look deceptively
simple, but we can see their knowledge of anatomy even in the quality of the
line. Students will be challenged to go for that extremely subtle simplicity,
using traditional wash to tint papers so that they can start with a lovely
neutral tone that can push darks and lights into bringing real volume into
drawing. Students will also create anatomical studies of parts of the body,
learning surface anatomy, drawing with conte', beginning with standard drawing
paper and working their way up to heavier, better quality paper.
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