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KATHERINE GAGNON
KATHERINE GAGNON
KATHERINE GAGNON
All images © 2014 Katherine GagnonEssay © 2014 Christopher Stackhouse
No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced without the permission of the copyright holder.
Designed by Heather Graham
Printed at Indigo Ink9221 Rumsey Rd, Suite S-6Columbia, MD 21045
5
KATHERINE GAGNON
WoodblockOil on woodblock
4” x 4” x 1.5”2014
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Tropical DreamOil on cotton
6’ x 6’2014
Installed at Art Farm, Nebraska
Katherine Gagnon-Paintingby Christopher Stackhouse
Images of Work
Biography
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9
43
KATHERINE GAGNON
1
KATHERINE GAGNON - PAINTINGBy Christopher Stackhouse
Color is a ubiquitous luxury constantly available to the healthy
attentive eye of painter Katherine Gagnon. Taking on chromaticity
as a primary formal concern can run the risk of reducing painting
to academic monochromatism. However, Gagnon privileges the
use of pigment, hue, and tenor without subordinating the structural
import of shape and line. Compositional integrity in the development
of a legible expression, in a declared complete painting, depends
on a careful balance between these components. Draftsmanship is
necessarily employed, but figurative images as they appear in the
paintings culminate from brush strokes and paint handling. Drawing
is subsidiary to painting. Figuration tends to give way to abstraction,
and, abstraction to figuration, essentializing properties of form. The
trading back and forth form and formlessness while near exclusively
using color as the hinge has many precedents. Historically important
to relate to Gagnon, for one, is the painter Perle Fine (1905-1988).
Fine’s diversity in painterly approach expanded over a long career
(gestural, geometric, figuration, symbolist), but Gagnon, as a
descendant of Fine’s, has compressed such an exploration constantly
shifting direction in order to find a painting language that works within
and outside of puristic painterly mode. It is this ambition toward a
theoretical ideal that provides the engine to constellate and weave,
while taking notice of the natural or material world through fantastical
indices of sensual, emotional, worlds. The results present a curious
building and subverting of artistic vocabularies.
Gagnon’s production over the course of the past few years has been
consistently serial. Each of the series is named like chapters of a
KATHERINE GAGNON - PAINTING
KATHERINE GAGNON
book – Carnival, Life Cycles,
Return Forward, Explorations
in Word & Image, and the latest
Loon Calls at Night. Favoring
the firm working surface of
wood (occasionally metal)
panel, preferring it to stretched
canvas, most of these paintings
are square in format with some
notable exceptions. Stump
(2014) (image 1) is a portrait of a
splintered tree stump in surrealist
color or in color that could have
been captured in a particular
but rare light of day. The bark is
striated in turquoise, sky blue, pink, green algae, orange with hints of
fuchsia and white. All of these colors are grounded by underpainting
in a tonal range of natural brown, which define the stump’s structural
mass. The growth rings of the dead tree that form a plane, equally
filled with a variety of hue, slopes toward the viewer. In these looping
bands Gagnon’s indulgence in and volubility with paint is clear.
However several relationships in art are being made in this ostensibly
unassuming image of modest dimensional size. Anthropomorphizing
the remains of the dead tree via portraiture re-animates it, gives
it expressive living character. Flanking this central figure are bark
tinged verticals that are implicitly thriving arboreal kin guarding the
wounded. Loosely brushed in, in the distance, are barren trees beyond
a clearing, and just peeking out above those is a bit of silver-white sky.
In combination a portrait is made of an object that constitutes the
contents of a landscape within a landscape, which has been damaged
by unseen forces but revitalized in the imagination of the painter. What
this echo and sight rhyme metaphorically indicate is no more specific
than what is visibly there, yet the possibilities are various. One looming
association is the one made of the ‘practice of painting’ with a ‘dead
image 1, pg. 2
3
tree’ returned to forest floor fertilizing soil for new growth. Projecting
a revaluation of painting based on what appears to be an arbitrarily
chosen object (a tree stump in the middle of nowhere) near singularly
reproduced in this art, might suffer being overstated if Gagnon’s effort
to speak (or write) through painting were not so dependably overt.
Paintings from Explorations in Word & Image draw further attention to
how indeterminacy is less of a strategy than a condition that frames
the productive tensions in
Gagnon’s work. A brush stroke
is a brush stroke disclosing its
ambiguity before betraying
it. Garden (2014) (image 2) is a
landscape that is carnivalesque
in tenor, loosely composed
primarily of softly rounded
chevron patterns in pink, blue,
and shades of yellow ochre. It is
a portal into a dream-like space
where what is happening in the
painting is painting performing
painting. It is playful and sincere. Unfinished flowers and mingling
dashes of green sketching tall grass, background two dark triangular
mounds. These blackish shapes could be mountains but they could
also be crudely drawn anatomical symmetry - breasts, or legs, or
arms reaching with hands disappearing into the foliage. Giving the
impression of a view out of an interior onto an exterior, exactly what
type of building a viewer might be looking out from, into this imaginary
yard, is beyond description. Arcs and angles impose linearity over two
dominant fields of color- fuchsia on the top portion, and, a warm orange
glow below it. The painter registers mark making as communicative, again,
with the specifics of the message being left with and guided by conjecture.
KATHERINE GAGNON - PAINTING
image 2, pg. 3
KATHERINE GAGNON
Other paintings in this series offer variable tests of this method.
Star (2014) (image 3), a hieroglyphic circle flanked at four poles by ovals
attached to it, hints at a face/head and at planetary orbit. Ride (2014)
(image 4) gives the visual sensation of the blurred periphery experienced
during train or automobile travel, while dissipating letters that could be
perceived to spell “DINE” or “RIDE” blend in with vertical and horizontal
lines, open and closed shapes that advance and recede into view,
groundlessly floating in undefined space. In another, Gagnon puns on
negation and secrecy, writing with a paint brush in cursive the word
“knot.” (image 5)
Mystique in art is a constant
quality upon which viewer
attention depends. Behind every
art work there are perceivable
unknowns, set off by the factual
object at hand that may inspire
curiosity. Gagnon takes for
granted the viability of painting
to intercept the eye and converse
with it. The physical act of
looking, with intentionality, is
image 3, pg. 4 image 4, pg. 4
image 5, pg. 4
5
KATHERINE GAGNON - PAINTING
both a muscular and subtle
exercise, especially in the studio.
Giving herself permission to
make paintings that are allusive,
expressive and accessible is
generous beyond the confines
of her practice. A great example
of this is Love Letter (2013) (image
6) a pinkish monochrome with
undertones of gray applied to an
approximate 4’ x 4’ galvanized
steel panel. It features another
singular centrally placed
equivocal document: a closed gift card envelope. Depicted flat and
frontal like a poster, the image of it is simple, smart, and clear. Its
dominant two toned rectangle in a square, with cadence of angles,
echoes and owes much to Post-War American Abstraction (geometric
and minimalist mostly). The title describes not only the painting as
a sealed love note to someone specific from someone specific, but
it cues Gagnon’s affection for modernist painting. What’s wonderful
about the choice in genre here is the lack of preciousness. The work is
deceptively direct. Gagnon has ideas that might be trying for a radical
formalist, yet inviting to the uninitiated. These paintings signal the early
stages of an artist making a passionate appeal to painting to continue
doing what it has always been known to do, and with volume, that is,
to speak to people.
image 6, pg. 5
KATHERINE GAGNON
7MICA MFA Thesis Exhibition
D Center Gallery, Baltimore, MD
KATHERINE GAGNON
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Tree FigureOil on panel
14” x 11”2014
IMAGES OF WORK
KATHERINE GAGNON
Loon Calls at NightOil on panel
5’ x 5’2014
11
IMAGES OF WORK
Running Through the WoodsOil on panel
5’ x 5’2014
KATHERINE GAGNON
SprungOil on panel
18” x 18”2014
13
IMAGES OF WORK
StumpOil on panel
30” x 24”2014
KATHERINE GAGNON
Hide and SeekOil on panel
18” x 18”2014
15
IMAGES OF WORK
SycamoreOil on panel
18” x 18”2014
KATHERINE GAGNON
Snake BiteOil on panel
18” x 18”2014
17
IMAGES OF WORK
Tulip SeasonOil on panel
5’ x 5’2014
KATHERINE GAGNON
For OpheliaOil on panel
16” x 16”2014
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IMAGES OF WORK
GardenOil on panel
16” x 16”2014
KATHERINE GAGNON
BloomersOil on canvas
4’ x 4’2014
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IMAGES OF WORK
RideOil on canvas
16” x 16”2014
KATHERINE GAGNON
PopOil on panel
18” x 18” 2014
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IMAGES OF WORK
On the RangeOil on panel
5’ x 5’2014
KATHERINE GAGNON
StarOil on panel
16” x 16”2014
25
IMAGES OF WORK
SlopesOil on panel
16” x 16”2014
KATHERINE GAGNON
KnotOil and sand on panel
18” x 18” 2014
27
IMAGES OF WORK
MeadowOil on panel
18” x 18” 2014
KATHERINE GAGNON
LeRoy E. Hoffberger Seminar RmMICA, 2013
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IMAGES OF WORK
Love LetterOil on galvanized steel
4’ x 4’2013
KATHERINE GAGNON
DropOil on panel
20” x 20”2013
31
IMAGES OF WORK
VeilOil on aluminum
12” x 12”2013
KATHERINE GAGNON
SailboatOil, aluminum, glass, and steel
7” x 8” x 4”2013
33
IMAGES OF WORK
WindowOil on panel
18” x 18”2013
KATHERINE GAGNON
PalladiumOil and sand on panel
24” x 20”2013
35
IMAGES OF WORK
MirrorOil on aluminum
12” x 12”2013
KATHERINE GAGNON
In the CloudsOil and gesso on panel
12” x 24”2013
37
IMAGES OF WORK
dust/lustOil on aluminum
12” x 12”2013
KATHERINE GAGNON
TouchOil on panel
16”x 16”2013
39
IMAGES OF WORK
FloatOil and sand on panel
24” x 24”2013
KATHERINE GAGNON
WholeOil on panel
16” x 16”2013
41
IMAGES OF WORK
fish swim awayOil on panel
18” x 18”2012
KATHERINE GAGNON
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BIOGRAPHY
Katherine Gagnon holds a MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School
of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA in Art
History and Studio Art from Colby College. In 2011 she participated
in the Summer Painting Intensive at Columbia University. She was the
recipient of the Hoffberger Foundation Scholarship from 2012-2014.
Her residencies include Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska and being
the Maryland Institute College of Art-St. Mary’s College of Maryland
Artist House Fellow in Residence for the fall semester of 2014 at St.
Mary’s College of Maryland. In 2014 she presented her paper “Art as
Communication” at the International Association of Word and Image
Studies Conference and the Annual Scottish Word and Image Group
Conference at the University of Dundee in Scotland.
Front Cover:Stump
Oil on panel30” x 24”
2014