Rising Stars: Meet Cathy Jacobs

Today we’d like to introduce you to Cathy Jacobs. 

Hi Cathy, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I am an artist, a painter by training, but my artworks have come a long way from what one might call traditional painting. I make three-dimensional wall hangings that are a blend between painting, sculpture, and woven textiles.

 Growing up in a semi-industrial area near the city of Detroit, I had very little exposure to visual art. Even though my parents knew very little about art, they always encouraged me to draw and paint. I studied fine art at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and later earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan. 

I have had some great opportunities to exhibit my artwork at home in Michigan as well as in places like New York, Chicago, and London. I am very thankful that I have a husband who is very supportive of my work. I also enjoy having a studio in a community of other artists at Ypsi Alloy Studios in Ypsilanti, Michigan. 

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
One of my struggles was to find my own artistic voice. How could I make my work stand out in a sea of other artists? I was good at drawing and painting. I enjoyed painting people and colorful scenes. But no matter what I painted, I could always find someone in art history who had already done it better. Or else, I knew that there must be a thousand other artists, alive today, who had already made a version of this same painting. As a result of this search for making something uniquely my own, my styles and subject matters changed all the time. For me, it was frustrating. 

It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that this cycle of making “redundant” paintings was broken. Another graduate student from the Fibers department suggested that instead of layering my really thin oil glazes on canvas, I might experiment with layering hand-dyed semi-transparent fabrics, like silk organza. I took her advice and promptly began taking the necessary classes to learn all about dyeing fabrics. I was mesmerized with the weave structures of the silk fabrics. I immediately signed up for a weaving class the following semester. 

Through weaving, I was able to express everything I had been trying to capture in painting — light, air, color, and vibration — but it was now in three-dimensional space! 

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
In my art practice, I am primarily either weaving large colorful linen screens on a floor loom, or I am painting large panels of industrially woven screens. Either way, the object is to layer the different colored screens so that their colors will mix in three-dimensional space –– kind of like a three-dimensional colorfield painting. The most interesting things to me about these artworks are that the colors are constantly changing and the overlapping screens cause wavy patterns to appear. I am fascinated by the ever-shifting movement of the wavy patterns (called a moiré effect) and the visual blending of colors that happen when looking through the overlapping screens. Of course, a lot of the optical play can only happen when the works are seen in person. 

If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
Growing up, I was one of 4 siblings, so there was always someone to play with and a lot of action going on in the house. As a young child, I was obsessed with drawing and painting. When I was 7 years old, I heard that a man named Picasso existed who was an artist, which meant he got to paint pictures all day. That is when I told my mother that I wanted to be an artist, so she went out and bought me a set of oil paints; she had no idea how toxic the fumes were. I would paint in the living room on little sheets of canvas paper while my siblings played around me. Whenever I was painting the little canvases or drawing my crayon pictures, all the surrounding noise and distractions would disappear. I was so focused. I am still like that today. 

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.cathyjacobs.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cathyjacobs_art/