Former Bucklin teacher to show art in Marceline
By STEPHANIE PATTERSON
LCL Managing Editor
HERMANN—The creative life of Catherine Mahoney was born with a bit of dust floating in a strip of sunlight and a set of Prang watercolors on the dining room floor. After earning a degree in Art Education at Truman University, the LaPlata native (Class of 1966) taught art in Bucklin (1970-74) and has been honing her craft for the past three decades in Hermann, Mo., eventually winning top honors in her home state and opening her own studio in Hermann called Colorful Brushes.
Very much a part of the creative community in Hermann, Mahoney has extended her love of art northward to Marceline, as a member of the North Missouri Arts Council. She’ll be opening her first show at the NOMO Art Center on Main Street USA, starting tomorrow. The Leader tracked down Mahoney (it wasn’t hard) and had the chance to ask her a few questions...
I’ve looked at some of your work on your website. Many of your pieces remind me of lavish book illustrations. They could easily be tied to some narrative (especially Slobaboi #1 and #2, Sante Fe Morning, and Jazz Sentinels: A Spiritual Juxtaposition). Are you thinking of a story when you make them?
I have a basic painting philosophy, that is best stated by a saying I once heard: Painting is silent poetry and poetry—painting that speaks. I am very pleased that you were able to “read” my “stories” visually. Slobaboi # 1 and #2 were painted after I returned from a Mission Trip to Moldova in l997. “Slobaboi” means “Praise God”. A most pleasant, hard-working woman, with few materialistic items, was very thankful for the blessings she DID have! Her every other word was “Slobaboi.”
Because she was so appreciative, because we were the first Americans who had ever came to visit her village AND because we were eating and fellowshipping together through her efforts.
The families of the community prepared a simple fare for us. They lived five kilometers from the silos holding the nuclear rockets aimed toward the USA. Humankind is all the same, however. She wanted us to know it wasn’t HER “wants” which cause them to have the rocket aimed towards us!
The Jazz Sentinels..., I believe, is even more of a story! Briefly, it tells the great birth of Jazz, as we know it today, delivered from the soul of the Negro Spirituals living in the New Orleans past.
Sante Fe Morning will not be in the show, it will be seen in a Western University Fine Art Exhibit, St. Joe, to be held in March.
Who or what are your influences?
I believe that my influences are two-fold: First, through my “teaching and passing-on the ART baton” burns a PASSION. Secondly, living for my Lord Jesus Christ, brings the delight of his creation awake in my en plein air paintings...if the viewer understands what drew me to paint about the subjects—places or people—then, I have succeeded!
You describe your paintings as “impressions of colorful light.” What does that mean?
If you ask an artist what their first visual memory in their life is—then you will often find it in their works—my first memory before I was four years old, is of my daily descent down the home stairs, moving toward a door at the bottom which had a window in it That allowed the Eastern sun’s rays to slant across the way. There the sun caught floating particles making the most fantastic “colors in the light”!
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