Interview with Catherine Parker


Dan: Catherine, when did you paint "The Journey"?

Catherine: You know, I can’t tell you exactly …

Dan: Would it have been in the 1990s, or before that?

Catherine: Well, not before that.  It’d be either 1999 or 2000, so it’s quite recent, actually.

Dan: You mentioned that your original inspiration for the painting was something to do with immigrants, is that right?

Catherine:  I had been working in a summer program.  There was a poem read by an African-American woman who was talking about her experience.  I think what she was saying in the poem is sometimes she got really tired of being African-American and having to carry her weight of all that on her shoulders.  Her experience, of course, is unique.  But, on the other hand, I think that we all are carrying the weight of people’s expectations of us.

Dan: Is that reflected in the painting, the carrying of the weight? We were talking about the figures in the foreground, and there’s a community of them. Can you say something about that?

Catherine:  The painting of the human figures in the painting was spontaneous and was not, necessarily, thought-out. You know, I don’t say to myself, “I’m going to put these people here to represent something” – I don’t do that. It comes more, probably, from my subconscious and so, for that reason, people read different things into the paintings that I do. And sometimes, I feel like I’m moved to paint something and don’t exactly know why I’ve done it myself until after it has been out there for a while. So it’s that it’s a peculiar process, I think.

Dan: Do you follow the same process every time?

Catherine: No, I don’t, no. Not at all.  Some paintings are more intentional than others.  Others are more, well … I believe there’s a creative spirit out there that you try to tap into, and sometimes you’re more successful than other times. But you’re moved to paint something, and you're the last to know why you are doing it. But then after I get started, I get involved in shapes and colors and try to make them work.

Dan: "The Journey" is kind of like two paintings, is that correct? There’s a rip or tear [down the center] on the right side of the painting.  Do you remember why you put that there?

Catherine: Well, I did it, actually I started – that was like an artistic decision and had to do with composition, and that’s when it was all in one at first and it seemed static that way – like it was too much of this row of trees, it was too much. And so I thought, “Well, if I divide that, if I make that division in there…” It was an aesthetic decision, I think. But then, you know, after I make it, I see that there is an emotional meaning to it also. Which, it could be a break with the past. And so, I feel like people are afraid to rate it in other ways, and what I saw after I did it, was that I had this one dark, an ominous figure, so you could make a story about that.

Dan: What is the story that came out of it for you, Catherine?

Catherine:  Well that would be, it could be the immigrant’s story or, you know, a journey from one place, one emotional place to another. That kind of thing.

Dan: Catherine, I will share with you my interpretation of the painting. You’ve said something about your work, that a lot of people read different stories or different experiences and a common experience into them.

Catherine: These last, probably last 10 years or so, as I’ve moved away more from representational painting into a more imaginative and more symbolic form, people tend to see other things than what I had intended.

Dan: And do people come up to you and tell you their different interpretations or meanings?

Catherine: Yeah, they do. That’s really interesting to me. Once in a while somebody will see something that I really don’t want them to see, and so I have to … One example was a nature painting of a woods, but there was one tree that – I can’t remember what it was supposed to be, but my son looked at it and he said, “It looks like somebody is smirking there.” I didn’t want that, so I just removed it. So, it will happen occasionally that somebody will see something that takes it totally into a different direction than I want, so I will just change that.

Dan: You’ve mentioned that a lot of these images come from your subconscious mind. Have you thought, 'That’s why people can read different things into them?'

Catherine: I think so, yeah. And I actually find that interesting to me, also, that they do that, and I like it.

Dan: That’s why you and I are meeting, because that’s exactly the process that happened with me when I first met you and we met at your house two or three years ago. I saw that painting, “The Journey,” and it just spoke to me about my own journey, dealing with depression – do you feel comfortable talking about this?

Catherine: Sure, absolutely.  [Laughs]

Dan: You get a hug for that. You’ve shared with me that you had an experience with depression.

Catherine: I did. Mine is – I’ve lived longer than you, and so it’s not that much of a problem anymore, but I probably was bipolar most of my life, and I think my father [watercolor artist, Charles Burchfield] probably was also.   I don’t know that people thought about him in those terms.   When I divorced,  my kids were fairly well grown and I  had been living in Emerald, Texas where I had raised my family.

Dan: How old were you when you divorced? You said the kids were fairly well grown?

Catherine: I was in my mid-forties. After I divorced, I moved to California and was living on my own.   My kids were in that period where kids go in and out of the house, are in school and back home, and then they’re gone.   I moved to California because there was nothing for me in Texas anymore.  It’s a very conservative place, and not a good place for divorced women.

Dan: How long did you live in Texas?

Catherine: 19 years.

Dan: Which part of Texas?

Catherine:   In the High Plains…

Dan: In which part of California?

Catherine: South of Santa Cruz. Well, my youngest girl was out there, and that was my reason for choosing it. There is a cliché that you get divorced, move to California, get a therapist and end up selling real estate. [Laughs.] But my reason for going was that my daughter was there. But, oh, then I crashed really badly.   I ended up going to Mexico, which was probably not a smart thing to do.  It was too soon after [my divorce].  I didn’t have skills to get along and know how to make contacts and friends and things like that. So I was in Mexico, and I was  hallucinating, besides the bipolar [disorder].   I imagined that I was disappearing.  I finally saw a therapist who helped me.   A second therapist that I  later saw described  my experience as taking literally the metaphor of “nobody sees me.” I didn’t have legitimacy. I was no longer a wife; I wasn’t a mother. At that time I didn’t have a job or friends. I left everything behind in Texas, and so I had that feeling of not being real.   I literalized that experience and hallucinated about that.  It was very, very scary. I was in and out of hospitals.

Dan: Did it feel like your depression …

Catherine: Well, I wouldn’t have called it depression. I would have called it…

Dan: What did you call it when you went through it?

Catherine: Well, I thought it was real, you know. I thought this was really happening to me. So I didn’t call it anything. I was in and out of mental hospitals for a period of several months, and there’s some really terrible institutions, really, really bad.

Dan: This is in Mexico?

Catherine: No, this was in California. Yeah, I fell apart in Mexico, but then I came back to California. My daughter brought me back, and then I went into hospitals. There’s some bad ones out there. Very abusive, and they drug you to the point of not being able to think straight at all. Just numbed you out. And so I was in and out of that for maybe three or four months.

Dan: Were you painting during that period of time?

Catherine: No, I wasn’t painting. I wasn’t doing anything. I was just trying to survive, and debating whether I wanted to survive. I finally decided I wasn’t going to, and I was going to kill myself. But I guess I didn’t really want to. I told my brother that I was thinking of it, and my brother was back here in the East.   He immediately came out west  found a hospital that was up in Emerald Park – much better room; it was connected with Stanford University, I think.  It was there I met a psychotherapist who put me on lithium and an intense course of psychotherapy.

Dan: Did that make a difference?

Catherine: The lithium? Well, it probably saved my life at that time.  But I think  [my psychotherapist] was good in that he encouraged me to take control of my own life as soon as possible. He really encouraged that. I was on some an anti-depressant for awhile, but we’re talking 25 years ago.  I think that whatever they have now is not as bad.

Dan: Oh, no – there’s been so many new generations of anti-depressant medications. Do you still take the lithium?

Catherine: No.

Dan: You stopped a long time ago?

Catherine:  When I came back to Buffalo, I stopped.

Dan: You said the psychotherapist encouraged you to take charge of your life. How did that manifest for you?

Catherine: Well, I got a job – that was the first thing.  I started to  try and make friends, and I went to a Unitarian church.

Dan: Where?

Catherine: In California.  I was there for seven years.  I developed a network of friends and associates,  I had a job and did various things, but ended up teaching there.

Dan: Teaching music?

Catherine: No, teaching art. I taught in various locations, but the steady job was teaching art in school – it was a school for gifted children, and I taught art classes and a third-grade curriculum.  The second therapist was good in that he helped me to understand. It was kind of a lengthy climb back up from hitting the bottom because I didn’t have a life to go back to. I had to kind of build it from scratch. Because I was in a new place, I had to get a job and all of this and that. So then I was teaching.

Dan: Were you painting?

Catherine: Yes, I was painting, too, some. But the teaching was full-time, so there wasn’t a whole lot of time, but then I just decided to drive across the country, painting my childhood. And the rest is history. It felt right to be back.

Dan: Back in Buffalo?

Catherine: Yeah.

Dan: What did that mean for you?

Catherine: Well, I needed to deal with my dad who was deceased.  I think that was all kind of  symbolic to get as far from it as possible, to get away from his influence. So coming back to Buffalo was kind of a surrender to who I am. And acknowledging that, okay, he was my father and I am a painter.  We come from the same creative place. And so instead of trying to paint like him, I tried to not paint like him.   I then ended up just painting what came natural. And so some people see an influence of him in my paintings and other people don’t.

Dan:    My  father also had a influence on me. You know, in many ways difficult, but I found that my journey, my coming to terms with him and our relationship was important to me, too. Is that reflected in your painting, in some way, or some of your subconscious energies, do you think?

Catherine: Yeah, it’s kind of a common way of looking at it. I don’t know if you can define it by saying that he and I both see the spirit in the natural world, or a spirit in the natural world.   But at one time, there probably was a sense of competition with him that I don’t feel anymore. Because I’ve made my own place in the art world, and I don’t question that that’s the right place.

Dan: Did your dad or your mom suffer with depression or emotional struggles?

Catherine: Oh, yeah, my dad, I’m sure did. He was extremely – probably bipolar, I think, but he had terrible bouts of depression.

Dan: How would it manifest?

Catherine: He couldn’t paint. And, my own feeling about [being] bipolar is that it’s almost as though the energy that flows through you gets dammed up and blocked in your body and psyche.   And I think that I my father worked, he wouldn’t be depressed. And when I’m depressed, I can’t work.

Dan: If you have depression you can’t work?

Catherine:   It’s not that I don’t have my highs and lows, but I don’t label it depression now. I think for me, one of the things is that I’ve lived a long time. I’ve been in and out of these routes, the highs and the lows, so many times that I know that both of them, neither one of them is the true substance of my life.  There just is… and empty times will come and go.

Dan: I’ve read a book by a Zen Buddhist who said that the experience of depression was not a lack of energy - - even though it can result in a person feeling very tired.  She said, like you, that it was actually a “damming up" of energy.  Their is actually too much energy that is  jammed in there to the point that ones  circuits are blown and we shut down.  And there’s no creative, vital, healthy, expression of that energy, and that’s what makes people suffer depression.

Catherine: Yeah, that’s the way it feels to me. It gets jammed up. And I’m not saying that that doesn’t still happen, and that I don’t go into a kind of a hyper state sometimes, too – but I think it’s a realization that those are passing states of mind.

Dan: Not like a concrete identity.

Catherine: It’s not a concrete identity, yeah.

Dan: You previously told me that in some ways your experience with your breakdown or depression, the experience that you had, is kind of like a death and a rebirth.

Catherine: Oh, absolutely.

Dan: Why did you feel that way, Catherine?

Catherine: Oh, because I was a different person when I came out.  Not totally but, I mean, very, very different. When I was a young woman, even through my married life, I was incredibly shy and incredibly quiet.

Dan: I was more shy in high school. I was shy, too.

Catherine: Yeah, and also I would work too hard to get along with people.

Dan: Me, too.

Catherine: Just incredibly …

Dan: To please others?

Catherine: To please others. It’s really hard to please others. And so, this was my California experience, because I was there seven years – and it’s just symbolic. That was a time to relearn how to look at people in a different way, so it was very, very turbulent.

Dan: So you were trying a lot of new behaviors?

Catherine: New behaviors, getting friends, losing them, fighting with them, and all that. I was afraid to express any anger at anybody, and particularly with men. And I think that probably [came from] my father, because he was more distant than my mother. My mother, well, she adored me. I mean, she babied me, but she absolutely adored me.

Dan: So as much as there was an absence of emotional connection with your father, there was an abundance of it with your mother?

Catherine: Yeah. And there were always relationships with the opposite sex – that was very, very turbulent – and trying to please men. Stormy. It was a very stormy time in California.

Dan: Does the storm seem to have subsided?

Catherine: It’s that I’ve learned. And also, people didn’t treat me the same. Sometimes I think it’s hard to change if you don’t move. It’s easier to change your own behavior if you move, if you have bad habits. To move physically and start a new way of being in the world. It was very, very turbulent with my kids, because they were used to this one kind of mother, and I wanted to be a different kind of person and they didn’t know how to …

Dan: Did they have to make some adjustments to the 'new Catherine'?

Catherine: Yeah, did they ever. And so that was turbulent, too.

Dan: Did they say, 'Where’s the other Catherine?'

Catherine: Yes, that was what they were saying yeah, right. The 'old Catherine' they felt comfortable with.

Dan: One of the things I’ve talked about with my psychiatrist and therapist is that, much like you, I was very shy; I was very artistic as a child, and I tried to please people a lot. I had a very domineering, alcoholic  father.   To me, it’s more than just wanting people to like you. I think it raises the question of who am I if people don’t accept me and like me? I couldn’t distinguish myself separate and apart from what other people needed or wanted from me. I don’t know if you had that experience.

Catherine: Yeah, absolutely. For me, it was a process, and it didn’t all turn into sweetness and light coming back to Buffalo. But I was more clear, a little more at home with myself. I also needed to do that, come to terms with being my father’s daughter and start to get comfortable with that and then be accepted for myself. Which is one of the reasons why I use my married name. I jokingly say that one of the good things I got from my husband was his name.

Dan: Do you think your painting is evolving or changing as you go on?

Catherine:  Yeah, all the time it is, yeah. It seems to me that it just would get very stagnant if it wasn’t. I once said that every painting is an experiment.

Dan: Are there some paintings that you start and then, you know, you might do 10 percent of it and then stop?

Catherine: Yeah, I don’t know where I’m going with it and so [I decide to] put it aside. That was true with the painting you purchased from me, “The Journey.”  That changed a lot as time went on.  I think you put some things down, you might have an idea, but then the painting has a life of its own.   You have to try to figure out what the rules are and not try to impose your meaning on the painting. I don’t know if that makes sense.

Dan: It does. I’ve read a lot of Carl Jung [famous Swiss psychiatrist and contemporary of Freud].  He wrote alot about the unconscious mind.   Above the door to his office, he had a sign which read: 'Beckoned or not, God still comes."  He thought of that expereince as something beyond our conscious mind and c0ntrol.   Something that resided within our subconsciousness that was trying to take us on a Journey to our True Self.    He thought of this reality of the True Self was much more profound and deeper than your own individual little life dictated by the demands of our ego. And I think that’s what is reflected in your paintings. For me, the connection to the Mary Oliver poem called “The Journey,” where she says, that we all need to be 'determined to save the only life you could save,” meaning your own life.   It sounds like what you’re describing, that period in California, was a sense of determination to save your own life.

Catherine: And I do believe in some kind of a power beyond yourself, too, that takes you where you need to go. It seems like once you start on that grueling path  to become yourself, that you can’t go back. At some point, your choice is to go forward or to die. And, you know, if you choose to stay alive, you’re going to. And so somehow, I think that the universe conspiresto put you in the situations that will force you to …

Dan: Despite your own …

Catherine: Despite our own way… that’s right, despite if you’re trying to evade it.

Dan:  Well, thank you for time Catherine.  It has been a pleasure talking with you today.

Catherine:  You're welcome, Dan.