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It’s apparent by looking at Cathie Bleck’s swirling, flora and fauna–rich scratchboard work that she has a profound attachment to the land and anything that grows. Especially trees. As it turns out, the Ohio-based artist grew up on her grandparents’ 20-acre tree nursery on Sheridan Road north of Waukegan. The property butted up against a forest preserve, and Bleck’s grandfather collected and propagated seeds. “His goal was to plant trees that would last 400 years,” Bleck says. It’s not surprising that this environment would find its way into her art and take root.
“Open Spaces,” an exhibition of Bleck’s work from her recent book of the same title (published by Murphy Design), is at I Space, where Bleck will give a talk on Friday 25.
Bleck attended the University of Illinois, as did her parents and eight siblings; all of them studied in the art and architecture department. (Her father had an architectural practice in Lake County for 30 years.) Bleck is a watercolorist by training, but when she was in school she studied everything—medical illustration, printmaking, oil painting, industrial design. “I really didn’t know that there was such a thing as doing work for print and that you could make a living by doing that,” she says. “I fell in love with the idea of having a canvas for such a big group of people.” Bleck illustrates for publications such as the Atlantic and The New York Times (where she appears frequently in the Op-Ed section). A recent project involved creating the icon headers for the Wall Street Journal redesign.
She found her way to scratchboard 20 years ago because drawing just came too easy for her. “I wanted to be challenged in ways that drawing didn’t,” she says. All the Bleck kids, who grew up without television, learned to draw really well; they would gather around large sheets of their father’s architectural paper and draw together. But she also fell in love with the process and the material; the act of carving through clay and the fact that it is made of crushed eggshells.“Scratchboard is one of those mediums that, in the fine-art world, people turn their nose up at,” she says. “And I have been on sort of a quest to change that.”
Looking at her work brings American artist Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) to mind. “Let’s just say that I think Rockwell Kent may have turned to scratchboard, too, if he could,” she says. Another influence is children’s book illustrator Lynd Ward (1905–1985), but really, Bleck says, “the whole gamut of wood engravers and that whole era [of the 1920s–1930s].”
Bleck took her sweet time when it came to introducing color into her work. “So many people wanted me to work in color, and I really love black and white,” she says. “I just wanted to discover it on my own.” Now she mixes her own inks. “The thing about working with clay and pigment is it’s tricky because it dries so fast,” she says. The goal is to lay it down quickly and leave it alone. You can’t fuss with it, she says, and you have to be willing to let little accidents happen.
Bleck has also begun working on 30" x 60" panels, which is large for scratchboard. They are custom-made of Masonite with birch backing every two feet to keep them sturdy so that the surface won’t be susceptible to cracking.But a new innovation has given Bleck some freedom: liquid clay. After putting the ink down, she begins her scraping and carving and she has been able to experiment more with texture using rough brushes. If she makes a move she isn’t happy with, all is not lost. “It is really fun now,” she says. “You just put the [liquid] clay down and if you don’t like it you can just wipe it off with water.” We get the feeling that for Bleck, starting over also comes easy.
Cathie Bleck will talk about her work and the “Open Space” at Ispace on Friday 25 at 7pm.
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