Catherine Mulligan, Still Life
Catherine Mulligan's Still Life beautifully conveys her interest in duality -elegance with sprawl, precision with chaos, stillness with movement. The work has a remarkably rich surface of linear marks and dabs of bright color against a muted background. Combining underpainting, drawing, and overpainting, Mulligan creates a shifting space where objects appear and disappear.
Mulligan is a young painter living in West Philadelphia. Born in Nutley, New Jersey, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania. Her paintings -including landscapes, figures, and still lifes have been exhibited at the Philadelphia Sketch Club, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg. Of her work she has written, "Uncertainties, insecurities, unmet hopes or desires [are what] I aim to contain and resolve through a painterly language that is as often elegant and precise as it is awkward, sprawling, chaotic, and clumsy."
Listen to Emma E. Hitchcock, Woodmere's Collections Manager, explain the feeling she gets from this piece.