When looking at an abstract piece of mine, I see signs of landscape everywhere. Is this me projecting my love for landscape onto what I am looking at or is my subconscious mind contributing to what I create?
Whichever it is, it’s clear to me that my surroundings mean a great deal. I’m engulfed by beauty in Cornwall and can’t ignore it.
The coast is a place where I’m forced to stop and let go, so I frequently choose to paint here in the hope that this sense of freedom comes through in the work.
I find I often flick between abstraction and representation in the moment, back and forth, like the tide going in and out or the transition from land to sea.
Saul Cathcart 2024
Short Film
A short film made by Oh Kestrel Film for David Collins Studio, about me and my process in making two commissioned paintings for Anantara Plaza Nice Hotel
Anantara Plaza Nice Hotel Commission
Saul was commissioned by David Collins Studio to make two large paintings for the lobby of Anantara Plaza Nice Hotel.
Click the button below to read more about it at Elle Decoration.
Review by Clark Rickard
Sunlight and shadows!
Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and David Bomberg, to mention a few, all drew inspiration from the Cornish landscape in their painting.
Now one of the younger generation, Saul Cathcart, is following their examples by adding his own vision. Developing his personal pictorial language to represent his experience of it in exhibitions for us. He is changing our own seeing and thinking about it.
To enter a Saul Cathcart painting is to be immersed in a spacious world of flowing forms of colour and movement. Although they are beneficiaries to the history of Modernism they also have echoes of Eastern art traditions, especially Chinese brush painting.
They represent an extension of the tradition of the Cornish landscape enquiry using a mixture of innocence and knowledge. They embody a serious playfulness that is refreshing for the eye as well as challenging to the intellect.
Created out of the landscape ‘plein air’ at all times of the year, often from high vantage points, they have a lyrical poetry being free of the ‘existential’ struggle which inhabited so much ‘post war’ attempts at earlier modernist landscape painting.
Saul manages to balance both depth and two dimensional flatness within the image. The horizon is not allowed to dominate and chop up the compositional space.
One senses the movement of forms, shadows and light of the kinetic event that he is witnessing unfold before him.
To capture this is a great gift, his paintings bring joy and happiness to a subject that an earlier generation had viewed through ‘war torn’ eyes.
Saul achieves a translation of an experimental stimulus into a new graphic language.
Clark Rickard - Art critic
“The curious quality I find in the work of painters whose subject is their own world is that they use painting as a means of making strange the world they intimately know. This struck me forcefully last summer when I encountered the work of Saul Cathcart at the Crypt Gallery in St Ives. Artistically, that town is, of course, a temple to kitsch, but Cathcart’s impressionistic, quite jazz-inflected plein-aire paintings were a bold rebuttal to all the blue rectangles on sale elsewhere. Documenting live interactions between the artist and the place he was painting, usually a place within a few miles of his home, they dramatize a meeting place between an inner and an outer landscape, so that what became visible in the gallery was what it had felt like to be in that moment.”
“Landscapes are mute. Hills do not give up the secret of what they mean, water is indifferent to us, and every blade of grass will forget us when we leave it behind—and that strangeness is in every painting; but in the work of people who have spent a long time with the places they paint, the nebulous significance of everywhere can become more richly and densely textured and expressed.”
Barney Norris - British writer
Education:
Winchester School of Art – Fine Art (BA) 2001
Falmouth College of Art – Foundation Art and Design 1998
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Morgans Falmouth
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Cornwall Contemporary
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Gallery Tresco
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Valency Fine Art