Catherine Beaudette
"Catherine Beaudette" by Sascha Hastings, Fall 2007, pp. 146-48
Large luscious paintings of shells, seaweed, mushrooms and Etruscan pots may seem incompatible with our technological age, but for the Toronto artist Catherine Beaudette, technology, history and nature are interconnected.
Begun during a residency in Banff, Beaudette’s newest paintings build on an earlier body of work that celebrated the intricate beauty of aquatic creatures such as fish and frogs, what she calls “the fascinating technology of nature.” But they also draw new inspiration from sketchbooks she filled during a recent trip to Italy, where she spent weeks studying catalogues of ancient artifacts and drawing objects in Rome’s Villa Giulia, a national museum dedicated to the long-lost Etruscan civilization. A light went on when Beaudette realized that the harmonic proportion inherent in so much of the natural world could also be observed in Etruscan vases, pots and other artifacts; whether by intuition or design, the Etruscans developed a beautiful and sophisticated material culture that mirrored the much older geometry of nature.
Like the objects that inspired them, Beaudette’s paintings are beautiful, sensuous and multi-layered. She begins by applying a base layer of earthy reds, oranges, yellows, browns, blues and greens. In some paintings, it is just barely evident that in this first layer the artist is depicting fragments of Roman frescoes, but in most it is so painterly that Beaudette could easily have dropped her brush at this point and left us with delicious abstracts. As it is, she has allowed the abstracts to become a deep ethereal pool for a host of natural and man-made objects that appear to float in and out of visual range. Spiral shells, sea sponges, seaweed, strange aquatic organisms and an astonishing variety of mushrooms share the space with Etruscan jugs, amphorae, cups and other vessels and artifacts. The sense of depth Beaudette achieves in these paintings is so intense that at times one feels as though one is travelling through the cosmos while the detritus of natural and human history comes hurtling past. Furthermore, this sensation of objects appearing and disappearing in multicoloured nebulae evokes not merely the passage of time, but also, perhaps, the idea that past, present and future are really one single continuum, and that today’s technology is not merely of the here and now but builds on technologies of the past and of nature. Human and natural creativity are a continuous mushrooming—even as things decay and die, out of death comes new life and consciousness, a comforting thought even as Beaudette’s work brings us face to face with the limits of today’s technologies and the certainty of our own mortality.
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