ARTIST STATEMENT

Taking a break from my more figurative work with up to 21 runs thru the press, my recent work has been a gradual transformation to a more non-objective approach to the landscape. The beauty of water and the ever-changing colors of the landscape have been a constant source of inspiration throughout my almost forty-year printmaking career. My recent work is a convergence of color, line, shape, and texture in an ambiguous space with whispers of landscape. I have been striving to pack as much color as possible in the fewest runs thru the press using blended or split fount rolls of transparent inks. I print reductively from one piece of ¼” plywood as a printing matrix on handmade Japanese Kozo paper. I also use mylar stencils to work reductively within one shape at a time to extend the color possibilities, printing ‘pochoir’. While my art does not tend to be political, I have seen the bleaching of the coral reefs as a scuba diver.  I have witnessed the disappearance of the beautiful glacier, La Mer de Glace in Chamonix, France between my first visit in 1977 and my last visit in 2004.  I am very worried about the impact of fossil fuels on the environment.  The warming of our oceans will have a negative impact on all of us as well as future generations. I have been thinking a lot about Climate Change and our responsibility to the life of our planet the past few years. I feel Mother Earth is getting even, with this pandemic, for all of humanities abuses. It was inevitable that these realizations would influence my art.

BIO

Originally from New York City, Cathie lived overseas six years in Saudi Arabia and France. She returned to Peoria in 2004 from Grenoble, France. She has concentrated on the color reduction woodcut since earning an MFA degree in 1987 from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois where she had a one-person retrospective in December of 2016. Her work has been included in more than three hundred exhibitions, thirty solo exhibitions, ninety juried national shows and twenty-five international juried exhibitions since completing a BFA from The Ohio State University in Columbus Ohio. Crawford has received fifty awards at both the national and regional level, seven since 2021. Her woodcuts have been exhibited in twenty-nine states as well as Bulgaria, France, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and the UK. Crawford’s prints are included in private and corporate collections in eight countries including the Print Center New York in New York City; The American University Museum in Washington DC; The Safeya Binzagr Darat in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; the Newark Public Library, Newark, New Jersey and the Peoria Riverfront Museum in Peoria, Illinois.