CATHLEEN GORDON
Swimming Fish, mixed media, 10" x 10"

Cathleen Gordon joined the Southeastern Community College art department in 2006 after teaching for seventeen years at Colby Community College in Colby, Kansas. She currently teaches Art Appreciation, 2D and 3D Design, Mixed Media, and Art History. She lives and has a studio in historic downtown Burlington, Iowa. Her works are in collections throughout the United States.

The artist tells us this about her work:

"My mixed media works are the product of layers of paint, glazes, and varnish that have been embedded with drawn imagery and collage elements. I have always been intrigued by the appearance of schematics and mathematics and recently began to incorporate them into my work as structural texture to give depth to the picture plane. As these layers develop the subjects begin to evolve into an aesthetic statement. When placed in a new context, simple imagery, text, and fragments move from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

I think of my artworks as visual vignettes. I often conceive a short story and then select the most interesting sentence or thought within the story to become a painting.  Because I am the only one who knows the original context of the statement, the viewer is forced to develop their own relationship with the work independent of my initial narrative. Artists like Sophie Calle and Annette Messenger have influenced my interest in dependency of image and word, where alone neither is illustrative but relies on the other for completion."

Cathleen Gordon's website

text and image from The Chait Galleries Downtown