joseph scissorhands: Catherine Kurtz: Pinned

Saturday 18 December 2021

Catherine Kurtz: Pinned

Catherine Kurtz - Pinned VII, 2020

"Drawing and paiting find me at my most alive. The prematurely dead forms of butterflies and birds force me to confront the brutality of loss, even while I observe their great beauty and charm." - Catherine Kurtz.

Pinned IV, 2017

I simply couldn't resist the chance to see this last exhibition of the year for this blog. I had to take the opportunity to see what another artist working with the butterfly motif as an important part of their oeuvre was creating, and how their vision and treatment of the subject matter differed from that of my own. I encountered the most enchantingly painted, small-scale studies of not only butterflies, but also birds and small samples of fabric arranged against a simple cream coloured ground. For her Pinned series of painted butterflies Kurtz states -

"I have always found specimen insects creepy, and felt uneasy about their suspended beauty. However when I came across some butterflies in an antique shop in France I suddenly saw a connection to an important memory of mine. I have been carrying around fragments of the TS Eliot poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock since my teens. My memory specifically involves this passage:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all -

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

So the butterflies spoke to me both of the poem, which addresses mortality, but also of the plight of women, and myself as a woman. I chose to paint them in order to contemplate this, and to allow me to present the butterflies to th viewer through my own interpretation."