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Kathy's Bio
Growing up outside of Windsor Ontario
on Lake St. Clair it was decreed that I was destined for the
lively arts in the first grade. My teacher and classmates
gave me the nickname The Artist. Mine was a visual childhood--I
was always drawing, painting, cartooning. There were aural
moments, too (mostly when I was listening to pop tunes and
making adults scream). Television was omnipresent- one in
almost every room. Cartoons and old movies transfixed me then,
as they often do now. Newscasts demonstrated many forms of
bad behavior by adults whom I wanted to watch but didn't want
to know. At the age of nine I witnessed the worrisome spectacle
of Nikita Krushchev slamming his shoe on a table at the U.N.
while shouting, "We will bury you!" A giant air raid siren
was erected in our idyllic village and we were taught to "duck
and cover," then march home to basements or bomb shelters.
The most stimulating thing about Windsor
was that it was across the River from Detroit. That fabled
city had ben a lure ever since my first visit to the Tutankhamen
Exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts. As a young teen
I sat under Diego Rivera's murals of Detroit's auto factories
while eating oatmeal cookies and felt mystical stirrings.
My first loves were the French Impressionists. Then I was
seduced, willingly, by Surrealism and Dada. My Mary Cassatt
knockoffs still hang in my parent's bedroom. An hybrid original--Magritte
meets Dali--can be contemplated in the bathroom, where we
all think many aesthetic thoughts. I visited galleries everywhere
to see everything. I read, drew, and painted. The addiction
had taken hold.
In my teens, I listened to Motown and
the British Invasion on the Motor City's ground-breaking FM
radio stations and danced after school on CKLW TV's Swinging
Time. (Fame would soon be mine, I was certain.) Through my
adolescence and into my twenties I was running off to Detroit
often. And whom did I see there? Only the best. The Beatles,
the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Patti
Smith, all on their first tours. Iggy and the Stooges scattered
the birds from the trees in a park on Woodward Avenue. Alice
Cooper played our high school for pennies a song . And there
were art shows, dance performances, theatre, shopping, spontaneous
adventure--it was all there. There were crushing disappointments,
too. I could have bought an Andy Warhol flower silk-screen
print-- for peanuts--from J.L.Hudson's Detroit furniture department;
but, alas, never did. (The phrase "I'll buy it later" has
often been my downfall.) Clothing was a language, accessories
a dialect. I wore Mary Quant, Betsey Johnson, and thrift store
finery. Travel was broadening, so at age 16 I got a Ford Mustang.
With wheels, I was free.
In Detroit I attended the Society of
Arts and Crafts (it's now the College for Creative Studies),
graduating with BFA degree, and a major in print-making. (There
were some who said I'd never amount to anything. Guess I showed
them.) I spent a good part of that four years in white gloves,
my nose inches from prints, drawings, perusing photo collections
in the vaults of the Detroit Institute of Arts, schlepping
through the Detroit Zoo, and dashing pell-mell to the International
House of Pancakes. My education was boundless; my hunger for
knowledge bottomless. I explored painting, sculpture, printmaking,
jewelry-making, photography, yoga, vegetarianism, Indian dance,
and marriage. Whee! I became a member of the Theosophical
Society. Movies became films . I exhibited my work, and sold
it, too, in the US. and Canada. Art was my life, and my life
was Art.
After I got my degree (and my divorce),
I left for Toronto, Ontario. York University offered me a
bursary to do an MFA in photography. But it was Open Studio's
atmosphere of free creativity that won me over. Being around
working artists thrilled compared to academia at York. I made
prints, studied Josef Alber's Interaction of Colour, and scored
the rent by teaching night school art classes. I explored
Ontario and Quebec's remote reaches, taking off in my trusty
'66 Dodge Valiant to photograph, draw, and paint God's wonders.
I'm a city girl, no doubt about it,
but the strongest influences upon my art come from Mother
Nature and her creations great and small, from the moss and
lichen under my feet to the sky over my head. My work springs
from both my personal dream world and my conscious life, often
reflecting the moment between sleep and wakefulness. When
I work, it's in a flurry. Mania overtakes me. Deadlines and
dreams ignite inspiration.
Some gypsy element in my Romanian blood
has given me a lifelong wanderlust and appetite for music.
I started to sing in Toronto; later, I took the music on the
road and traveled through the Rockies to the West Coast, Vancouver
Island, the Gulf Islands, and then up to the Queen Charlotte
Islands. Our Gypsy caravan was an old G.M. van, with a bed
built over our PA system and instruments. I've hiked and camped,
scaled mountains, traversed the rainforests and deserts of
North America coast to coast with my camera and watercolours.
I lived on the West Coast for four years where I sang original
songs with several groups, then returned to Toronto to keep
the music going for another couple of years.
Later I settled down (as all wild things
one day must) after eloping to Rome. (Linguini! Lollobrigida!
La Dolce Vita!) We spent six weeks taking in art, architecture,
and landscape while drinking and eating our way around the
Northern half of Italy. A year later we darted around England,
doing much the same in car little bigger than a hedgehog.
Travel, deadlines, and dreams worked to ignite inspiration.
I continue to travel, alone, or with
my daughter, dog, and friends, exploring wild areas. Recently
spending two weeks apiece in Newfoundland and Manitoulin Island.
Nature and music never fail me.
Visual artists who have influenced me:
Paul Klee, Mark Rothko, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Bacon,
Lucian Freud, Sandro Botticelli, Keith Haring, Josef Albers,
Eva Hesse Diane Arbus and Imogene Cunningham.
Kathy Vatcher 
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