Catherine Eaton Skinner

Artist Catherine Eaton Skinner illuminates the balance of opposites and numerical systems – ranging
from simple tantric forms to complex grids, reflecting mankind’s attempts to connect to place/each
other.
Skinner’s creativity stems from growing up in the Pacific Northwest, her Stanford biology degree
and Bay Area Figurative painters Nathan Oliveira and Frank Lobdell’s painting instruction. Between
Seattle and Santa Fe studios, she concentrates on painting, encaustic, photography, printmaking and
sculpture.
Various art anthologies contain her work. 100+ publications have highlighted Skinner’s art,
including LandEscape Art Review (London), Artists on Art, Magazine 43 (Berlin, Hong Kong,
Manila) and the Radius Book publication of her monograph 108.
Skinner has had 39 solo domestic and international exhibitions. Marin MOCA, the Royal Academy of
Art, Yellowstone Art Museum and the Japanese Handmade Paper Museum have shown her work.
Corporate and public collections include the Embassy of the United States, Tokyo; Boeing
Corporation, Seattle; and the University of Washington, Seattle.

THE RAVEN:

I am a multidisciplinary artist committed to learning, traveling

and working with a curious mind. The work originates from elemental places: water, woods and mountains; air, wind and space. These express themselves through my poetry and physical forms: beeswax, resin and oil; stones and wood;

lead sheeting and precious metals; textiles and natural dyes;

old book pages and collected papers; cast glass and bronze.

I communicate with textures, color, simplicity and complications.

I live and travel in places of the corvids, crows and ravens. The most intelligent and curious of birds, their mythologies are intriguing and multi-faceted. Portentous to shamans in many populations, they are speakers from the underworld. Carriers of light to the new peoples, they guard souls on journeys to other worlds. Corvids search for knowledge to inform us. Their perspective of height and the capacity of breadth allow them to see “the essential pattern from whence all things proceed.”

Trees stand solemnly, reminding us to connect to the earth, to cherish the clean water that ensures our survival, and to look with our souls upwards to the sky and light. Standing beneath a tree, it is the cosmic pillar connecting energy between the earth and sky, the axis mundi. The tree becomes the meeting point of all directions, functioning as the omphalos (navel), the world’s point of beginning.

Our culturalmemory lies within the physicality of place as we continue to find ways to understand and bond not only to our environment, but most importantly, to each other. Each work becomes my pilgrimage to further these connections.