NYAB Event - Catherine Mackey "Wharves and Warehouses"

Catherine Mackey "Wharves and Warehouses"

This event has ended.
At Stricoff Fine Art, Ltd.
Media: Painting

Mackey’s work is primarily about the visual urban experience. She frequently wanders around the semi-industrial parts of her favorite cities – San Francisco, New York and London - sketching and photographing the buildings, piers and warehouses that have been the canvases of engineers, architects, graffiti artists and marketers.

She explores incidents of inadvertent beauty (those not planned by architects but created by time, decay and the intervention of individuals) as seen in the collisions of paint, sign writing, posters and graffiti on structures once intended for other uses. She sees the urban wall as an architectural palimpsest recording both the structural and social history of the building and the generations of people it has accommodated.

Mackey’s process parallels the visual fragmentation of the urban environment. She works on several wood panels concurrently, building up layers of paint, posters and stencils before combining the panels into a larger piece. Compositional consideration begins when several panels are placed together on the studio floor and the idea for a larger painting emerges. This process, with its fragmentation, spontaneity and acceptance of accident, becomes in itself an extension of the chaotic and colorful urban environment by which it is inspired.

Her current work explores old warehouses and pier buildings found at the waters edge around San Francisco and New York. Mackey uses the randomly developed under-paintings to lend an air of age and decay to these utilitarian structures which are rapidly disappearing under the wave of “urban renewal” rolling over both cities.

The multi-panel process is also being developed to describe journeys to and through the city. Here the arrangement of the panels, each one a fleeting glimpse, is pre-determined by the linear narrative of the journey. Walking from one end of the painting to the other will give the viewer a sense of passing through neighborhoods.

[Image: Catherine Mackey, "Containers #7". 48 x 48 Inches, mixed media on panel.]