We’re so fortunate to partner with local artists for our International Series at the Austin ISD Performing Arts Center. On Saturday, January 22nd, the work of Caitlin McCollom will be displayed in a beautiful and fascinating exhibit in the lobby for Irina Kulikova‘s concert. We had the chance to speak with Caitlin, and she shared some insight into how she became an artist, what influences her painting, and what she portrays in her work.
How did you become an artist?
I was calling myself an artist even as a little kid. I loved to paint and draw, and I had a super-active imagination and strong connection to spirituality. I grew up in Dripping Springs when it was still rural, so I was very connected to nature and bucolic solitude. I hated school very much; I couldn’t wait for it to be over. When I went to college, I decided to major in painting. It wasn’t a supported talent when I was younger, so getting to study it professionally made it apparent that it was not just a passion, but something that would be my whole way of life.
I started showing exhibits when I was a junior in college, and continued to show all over Texas after graduating. I also ran a little gallery with the intention of supporting other artists, but it was really a way to meet as many artists in the community as possible.
Then, I moved to New York City to get an MFA and pursue my career there.
Shortly after moving, I acquired a chronic genetic disease and fell very ill. I spent some time in the hospital, then moved back to Austin. I was desperately ill, couldn’t work at all, and didn’t really have any money, since I’d just moved to New York. It all just fell apart – I had to start my life over.
But it was an amazing time to learn what I really wanted out of my life: to be a full-time artist. It took me six months of doing nothing but healing, and then I got back to work once I saved up enough money for art supplies.
As an artist, I have a compulsion to create. The hardest part of the illness was that I couldn’t work for a while.
In New York it’s really expensive, it’s a really hard way of life. As a full-time artist, I can live a lot more inexpensively in Austin. I’ve been a full-time artist for a few years now, which was my dream! I don’t know if that would’ve happened in New York. I feel like I’m exactly where I need to be.
Do you feel that art helped you with the healing process?
When I was finally able to work again, I made this series called “Blood and White,” which was all about the fragility of the body, and the physicality of disease, and trying to make fragility and disease look beautiful. It was made in a stark way, but also in a way that had a very strong aesthetic component. I was trying to communicate to people where I had been the past year … that was healing.
Did your illness inform your aesthetic sense?
I definitely have a very particular aesthetic sense; I always paint in red, I love the symbology of it. And in my work from 2014, while I was healing, I had this strong urge to use the color blue because I was trying to communicate the idea of water as a symbol of the spiritual realm.
I read this book called the “Cloud of Unknowing,” an anonymous medieval text on early Christian mysticism. In it, there were beautiful, specific instructions for having a mystical experience. It was fascinating. The author talks about this idea that the way to experience God is through entering the cloud of unknowing: with no preconceived notions of what God is, and no knowledge of anything beyond your existence in the moment, God gives you a spiritual experience.
Around that time, I became fascinated by a weather phenomenon in South America called a Garúa: a low-hanging, transparent cloud that can appear suddenly. You don’t know it’s there unless you pass through it – it’s so dense that your body becomes soaking wet.
The garúa reminded me of the ‘cloud of unknowing’, and I realized that water was a symbol of the spiritual realm. What I try to say in my work is that what’s completely real can be absolutely invisible, and you only know it’s there from experience.
What message do you convey in your work?
The red is physical, and the blue is spiritual. You have this physicality, this red blood, and then something happens beyond you, and it’s like the water of the spirit realm mixing in with your blood.
It’s swirling all around you, and you feel the sense of being infused with something beyond yourself. It’s similar to the invisible experience of music causing a strong emotional reaction.
The abstraction of my paintings can purify meaning without confusing the viewer with a concrete subject, but each of my paintings has a specific shape. There are teardrops, orbs, hearts; these shapes are all Jungian symbols with universal meaning.
I try to have layers of symbols in my paintings to make them universal, but also very personal, so people can see their own lives and the meanings ascribed to them. What inspires me most is people’s stories about spirituality, and about near-death experiences.
Each painting has its own kind of message, and reveals itself to me in a different way. I can tell if a work is successful or not if someone looks at one and says it means to them the same thing it meant to me when painting it. It’s a visual language, so if it’s not translatable, I feel it’s not very successful. I really try to have a painting mean something attainable.