What follows is an interview of Cathy Locke (CL) by Jennifer Almodova (JA).

 JA – When did your perceptions of how you give value to art move to a new paradigm?

CL – I began seriously painting as a fine artist in the early 1990s. I studied with lots of people and took every workshop I could afford to go to. After about eight to ten years of painting, I began to notice that everyone’s work started to look the same to me. Of course there were variations in skill, but the work looked basically the same, one painting to the next.

At this point in my career as a painter, I was very obsessed and decided to get my MFA from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. After several years of painting seven days a week, I came right back up against that ugly wall of technique vs. emotional quality in my work. There was an old pattern carved into my being that just kept turning out paintings that strived for perfect technique, void of emotion. It was at this point my journey as a painter started to shift. I began to forge a new path that was by no means particularly clear. I started working with a painter at the Academy, Carolyn Myer, who had me begin journaling. She had me make lists of various emotions I wanted to capture in a painting, and then do small abstract paintings of those emotions. The experience allowed me to detach from the emotions themselves, I became like an archeologist of emotion. I was asking myself, “How could I show this emotion visually, what marks do I need to make on the canvas? What colors, what tonal value should I use? What movement should this piece have? ”

I continued on feeling pretty blind, I was certainly in uncharted territory. It is important for me to mention this, because for many years I really felt very alone and lost. When you are trying to build your skills as a painter in the terms of technique, the path is pretty clear. You just keep searching for that teacher that has better skills than you. Once you have mastered a comprehensible level of skill, you move on to the next master. When you are judging your work in terms of technique it is visually very easy for the artist to see how good their work has turned out. When you shift and start judging your work in terms of conveying emotion, the parameters that measure your success totally change.  I can’t tell you how many times I would finish a painting and just sit there with it as if we were intimate strangers who spoke different languages. Was it good? Was it bad?

JA – Since you were in ‘uncharted territory’ with no prior experience from which to discuss this, how did your time studying in Russia in 2003 help you?

CL – There was already a groove of frustration started inside of me!  I had spent an immense amount of hours perfecting my art, only to build layers of frustration. Though I was getting better and better, I wasn’t happy with the work. The better my technical skill got the more unhappy I got with the art. I was carrying a bundle of frustration inside of me.

As far as the people who were teaching me at that time goes, their words were holding less value to me. In addition I was questioning all of the artists who were around me. I was starting to separate off onto my own path. This whole process has been a lonely, self-searching, questioning path. Until finally I became the one little rag-tag student who said, “I don’t completely agree with you; what you are saying doesn’t really ring true to me.”  My fellow artists at that time thought I was crazy, and they said so much! It wasn’t that I didn’t respect those teachers at all, it is just what they were teaching didn’t resonate in me.

It was right after I returned from Russia, studying Russian painters in 2003, that I first started changing my perceptions of how I judged art. In Russia I was able to stand in front of painted canvases of work that I had never seen before. I was experiencing the work from a completely new paradigm. Since I had no intellectual data stored in my brain for these paintings, I was not able to analyze them from the thinking part of my brain. Instead for the first time, I read the paintings by feeling them. This planted a small seed inside of me.

JA – Sounds to me like even in grad school you were making a change from a skillful intellectual technique based reality to a more inner guided reality, more emotional and visceral. Going from an outer criteria, to an inner criteria. You were coming into your own authority at the time, in an educational context that didn’t understand or highly support this. Even your fellow students were unaware of what was taking place within you. That you were on a path that was not part of their lexicon, nor your instructors for the most part.