Catherine Colangelo 3 Months and 90 Days

“The assignment seemed simple enough: create 90 paintings 4” x 6”, each completed in a day. Also do 3 large pieces each completed in one month. In theory, it should have taken exactly 6 months. Instead, it took about 10 months and became a meditation on the daily conflicts between art and life.Some questions which arose in the course of doing this work:

Can you force creativity?Do I perform better creatively when under pressure or not?How can I stretch time when working under a deadline?Will my friends still recognize me at the end of the project?Will the daily pieces help me remember what happened during this period of my life?Or do the monthly pieces sum up more of an overall mood? Does the volume of small pieces, when seen all together, mask the fact that some of them are really bad? Does the volume of small pieces, when seen all together, hide the ones that are actually good?Why does there seem to emerge a general apocalyptic feeling in the large pieces?

The stimulus for specific pieces came from my day-to-day life: the funny and sometimes profound things my six-year-old says; words, ideas or emotions that struck me during the day; or the need on some days to simply do a mindless doodle.Somedays were good, some bad, but as an entire (unedited) group, the paintings serve to record the reality of the time I spent working over six months’ worth of days.”

After earning a BFA in Painting from The Cooper Union in New York, Catherine Colangelo returned to Houston to pursue her art practice. She was the recipient of a 2007 IndividualArtist Grant Fellowship from the Houston Arts Alliance.Catherine’s work has recently been featured in “Old is New”at Space 125 Gallery in Houston and the Texas National 2007at Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, TX.