Katharine Marais
Bio: Katharine Marais is a painter, poet, and ballerina. She enjoys working with the music scene, and has directed / danced in a music video for Weezer. She recently did a live dance performance at the Lever House Art Collection. Katharine’s real, literary, and ‘art’ narratives are inter twined, with stories moving from reality, to poems, to dreams, and back. Literature, poetry, and linguistic experimentation unfold online at a place called th_Eroses. Two of the main characters are Laila and El Toro (a flower painter, and a bullfighter turnedcherrytree). People describe the paintings as “dignified ecstasy”, “feminine”, and colorful.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: Laila is a passionless painter of flowers. She documents them in cool, objective detail without the slightest poeticization of an amorous corolla. She does not wonder their names. She renders them with a botanist's accuracy in black ink. She paints, files her paintings in the order of their completion, and never looks at them again.
Irises,
sprouting out the cathedral windows like Leonard Cohen's children of Suzanne children of the morning / leaning out for love / and they will lean that way forever -
Downright smoochy in lettuceedged petticoats, florid conchshells with dewdrenched seams whose floppy girlishness belies and elegiac howl for sanctification, for the triumph of Flower v. Fading Light, in an unending battle where beauty always dies, where the poet's pen is the only weapon, the only hope —
Roses,
queenly, but no less desperate for an offering — a lifetime spent as The Muse has left the rose clinging, lurking in poets' gardens, unfolding silently before the easel among crusted cadmiums and ultramarines, pools of caustic turpentine and linseed. Her feet ache from years on the modelling stand, but her comportment is eternally regal. The Poets have made her corolla a crown, and by their decree she has been canonized. (!) (a full-body shimmer).
In a moment of spontaneous affection, a particular fondness as she flicks through years of memories — a pleasant afternoon perched in Van Gogh's bedroom, the desert hospitality of O'Keefe — yes, they have been kind. Would the moon deign to reflect the light of the sun? The poet's offering has become her lifeblood, her daily bread, her raison d'etre.
In Laila's gaze she is the eternally new moon, black and full of possibility, the tide that never rises, the well of ink whose blackness contains innumerable images yet unpainted.