From The Collection: Cat Crotchett

Cat Crotchett in front of Phoenix, 24” x 24”, encaustic and metal leaf on panel, 2018

Artist Cat Crotchett has taught painting at the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University for over twenty-five years. She believes her teaching practice helps to keep her creativity active and notes that her school is fortunate enough to have two mobile encaustic carts, which allows her to expose undergraduate students to encaustic painting.

Cat took her first encaustic workshop eighteen years ago, at the request of a friend. The timing was right. She had just received notice that her sabbatical application was rejected and felt that a creative challenge might be good. She enjoyed the workshop and immediately purchased the necessary equipment and paint to get set up, however it took another eight months of determined experimentation, and many unsuccessful efforts, for her to figure out how she wanted to work with the medium.

Cat Crotchett, The Introduction West Meets East, 6” x 6”, encaustic on panel, 2010

The Introduction West Meets East, which is in the permanent collection at R&F, was part of an installation comprised of thirty 6” x 6” paintings focused on color and pattern. The paintings were made following a trip to Indonesia organized by one of Cat’s colleagues to facilitate cultural exchanges between Eastern and Western artists. During her time in Indonesia, Cat was part of an exhibition and taught two encaustic workshops. She also worked with a group of professional batik artists, which inspired her to begin incorporating traditional batik tools into her work. 

Installation shot from Cat Crotchett’s exhibition at R&F in 2010.

Prior to this trip, Cat’s work explored the figure, incorporating pattern as a structural element. After her return, pattern became front and center, serving as both a compositional tool and a metaphor. She began to focus on the interrelationships between patterns and the new identities formed when patterns were layered or juxtaposed, creating work that conveyed ideas about cultural appropriation, assimilation, fragmentation, and alteration.

Each of her paintings has self-imposed parameters, restrictions relating to Western color theory, pattern structures that mimic Eastern and Western cultural forms, and layers intended to represent cultural influence and sediment.

The versatility of encaustic, which allows for embedding and subtracting information, as well as its unpredictability, are appealing to Cat. She begins a painting with concrete ideas about basic compositional structure and how to layer color, but she lets go of knowing what the end result will look like. 

Tethered, 36” x 36”, encaustic on panel, 2019

Cat maintains a studio in Park Trades Center, an old building downtown filled with artists, artisans, and small niche businesses that is a regular stop on the Kalamazoo Art Hop every First Friday. She treasures the high ceilings and quirkiness of the space, as well as the proximity to other creative individuals.

Over the years, her paintings have grown in scale, allowing her to play with pattern in a whole new way. She enjoys having more space to manipulate and has found working larger to be liberating. 

To learn more about Cat Crotchett, visit her website: catcrotchett.com