I’m a self-taught artist inspired by the wild wonders of nature. Exploring the natural world – from mountaintops to coastal lava flows – taught me to listen to the greater forces and my deepest inner voice. I paint subjects that I know well and love, including Hawaiʻi Island’s majestic volcanoes and remarkable rainforest plants.
My paintings are a soft blending of myriad colors that reveal our beautiful, multidimensional world. Before I paint, I quiet my mind and let go of all that’s familiar—expectations, plans, thoughts, feelings. I sense my subject, and qigong and meditation open the door to my color selection and composition. A still mind and patience are key.
I apply multiple layers of oil paint using brushes, palette knives and rags, and blend, wet on wet, directly on the canvas. I often meld tiny amounts of color with soft brushes and a light touch, a technique that I call “whispering the paint.” Photos and sketches I make in the field guide my early brushstrokes as the painting’s composition unfolds.
I have lived on the verdant windward side of the island of Hawai‘i for more than three decades. A lifelong hiker and former national park ranger on Kilauea’s active lava flows, I learned early in life to listen to the greater forces and my deepest inner voice. In my youth, I explored California’s fog-shrouded coastal mountains and magnificent, High Sierra peaks.
I create my paintings in a rainforest studio a few miles below Kilauea’s fuming summit crater, with giant tree ferns and a cacophony of native birdsongs outside my window. From my rainforest lanai, I have seen the volcano’s red glow in the clouds and heard the crater’s booming voice. I share this forest home with my husband, novelist Tom Peek, and our orange cat Makanani.
My paintings are represented by several galleries on the Island of Hawai’i and can be found in private collections in Europe, North America, Japan and Hawai’i.
“Catherine captures the ethereal communion between nature and the viewer. What can be seen lasts only momentarily and she catches that – the light, the volcanic smoke, the moon, the wisps of cloud. In this way, she’s akin to J.M.W. Turner.”
Inspiration
“When you have patience, you have peace.
When you become peace, you feel the stillness.
Go into the stillness . . . travel with the light
Breathe . . . in alignment with the rhythm of the universe.”
Master Chunyi Lin, Founder, Spring Forest Qigong
(Catherine’s qigong teacher for over 20 years)
“You yourself are nothing, only a channel for the pouring through of that which is something, which is all. Your job is to keep that channel clear and clean and pure so that which passes through may be unobstructed, unsullied, undiluted, and thus show forth its clear purity and intention.”
Emily Carr, painter and author
December 13, 1871 – March 2, 1945
“Artistic expression is a spirit not a method, a pursuit, not a settled goal, an instinct, not a body of rules . . . art must take to the road and risk all.”
Group of Seven Exhibition Catalog, 1922
Quoted in The Group of Seven, Art for a Nation
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