Kate Cohen once had a ceramics teacher who would have students select their best pieces and take them to a long hallway. Then they’d mow their creations down with a bowling ball.
“They would smash into pieces,” Cohen says in our recent interview.
I gasp.
“It taught us nothing is precious,” Cohen says.
Ah, now I understand. The idea of art is to go beyond what’s precious.
“Otherwise you’ll only go so far,” she says. “That means no growth.”
The 61-year-old self-employed artist knows something about growth, and for that matter, what it means to be an artist, to live riveted to getting your best work out of yourself. Cohen, who lives in Aliso Viejo, Calif., has intuited so much along the way, but has also worked hard at learning. She has earned an M.F.A. in painting and sculpture at Washington State University and began with an undergraduate degree at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
“I learned the fundamentals,” she says. “That’s why I can do abstracts.”
Her father wanted her to have a liberal arts education, so she went to Syracuse for a semester before putting her foot down. She wanted to go to art school.
“Art classes were an hour here and there [at Syracuse],” Cohen says.
Contrast that with the Cleveland Institute of Art, where her life drawing class was all day long. It was a fit. Not a surprise considering how much time Cohen spent at her mother’s feet, at the base of her easel, while she created pastel portraits.
“When I refused to eat my vegetables, my father had me sit at the dining room table until I did,” Cohen writes on her website (https://www.katecohenart.com/). “My mother on the other hand, being an artist herself, would wait for him to retire. She'd bring down huge pieces of wonderful papers and pastels from her attic studio for me to use. The touch and smell of really good art supplies enticed me. I'd stretch out over the large table and experiment wildly. I was hooked. Experimentation has been my approach to art ever since!”
Cohen tells me a story of a man at their country club who was an avid freshwater fisherman who taught her brother how to fish.
“One day Charlie showed up in a really wonderful fishing hat,” Cohen says. “My mother said, ‘Sit down, Charlie, and tell me a story.’ I sat under her feet while I listened to him tell these wonderful stories.”
The memory makes Cohen emotional and she composes herself to finish, explaining that they gave Charlie’s framed portrait to his family.
“When my mother passed away in 1995 the family gave the portrait back,” she says. “My brother and I wanted to have her last art show.”
Seven or eight families contributed pieces and hearing the stories about her mother made a powerful impact on Cohen.
“Long before my mother was dying, it jelled in me that art was going to be my life’s work,” she says.
These days that work happens using her mother’s easel. It gives her joy.
“She got [the easel] when I was five years old,” Cohen says.
That combination of having creativity woven into her upbringing and spending time learning its history and structure have made Cohen into an artist who keeps engaging the ‘what if?’ in her projects. She allows the idea to determine what materials she uses. It’s constant experimentation.
“Inspiration comes from the corner of my eyes,” she says. “An idea keeps bugging me until it actually becomes more of a vision.”
That’s the space where the ‘what ifs’ begin. What if I use this material? Or that one?
“You’re missing out on a lot if you’re not open to the ‘what if,’” Cohen says.
Her website shows works on paper, on linen/board, and sculpture. It also contains a review by an art historian who says Cohen “draws from the traditions of Surrealism and folk art to craft riveting personal icons that record her life experiences in resonant symbols. She assembles diverse, often aged materials and arranges them into complex construction. She seduces the viewer by revealing her creative process and thus taps into the collective unconscious where symbols are transformed from autobiographical details to universal truths.”
It is not lost on Cohen that it’s a feat for an artist like herself to thrive in the Laguna Beach area, an artistic community more widely known for en plein air painting (the act of painting outdoors).
“That’s really what sells here,” she says. “But it’s not what I do.”
Lately the ‘what if’ has brought her to a new medium – colored concrete. She happily explains how she realized she can get white concrete and put colorings in it, that she can make the blue/black crow she is envisioning with different color polka-dotted wings, and that she can embed steel into it and it will patina as the weather hits it.
“Artist is who I am,” Cohen says.
So much so that she has always held jobs that allow her to be in her art. For the last six years, she has run Top Dog, a dog care service that includes walks, visits, overnights, and trips to the vet and groomer. It came about when she asked herself the question, what can I do that I love?
“It’s a perfect balance,” she says. “The thing that’s fortunate is that the dogs can sit in my studio while I work.”
She has found one place where ‘precious’ works just fine.
by Nancy Colasurdo
