Good portraiture is at once as intellectual and artful as any other kind of painting, and as personal and precise as crafting custom-made shoes by hand. Undoubtedly, Catherine Prescott has the mysterious knack for getting a likeness—for accuracy and objectivity in measuring and reproducing faces and bodies, for meticulous care in assembling the whole—but there’s much more to her art than that. Like a novelist, she makes character studies. Fluent in body language, the idiosyncrasies of clothing, and the tension of facial muscles, she is a master of objective correlative—of using externals to reveal the interior life. Unlike a novelist, she works with entirely real people, under their real names. This could get her in trouble if it weren’t that, in her noncommissioned work, she paints only people she really likes. Prescott has an eye for the hidden or unusual good in people—the overlooked patience, wisdom, generosity, or vitality—and she knows how to draw it out and make it physical. By selecting and isolating glances or gestures, she makes people more themselves. She has taught both portraiture and landscape painting at the Glen Workshop, and her students unanimously laud both her skill in teaching and her graciousness to painters working at all levels of experience.
Some of Prescott’s work is featured in Image issue 36 and issue 60. Read about Prescott’s and other artists’ work here.
Biography
The Armetta Brothers.
Catherine Prescott received a Bachelor’s of Arts from The Colorado College in 1966. That same year, she attended the University of Wisconsin and studied graduate painting. As a portrait painter, Prescott primarily works with oils and either canvas or wood panels. She has had solo exhibits at The Philips Museum–Dana Gallery, at Franklin and Marshall College; Pennsylvania College of Technology; Messiah College; and Gordon College. Collections of Prescott’s work can be seen at Pennsylvania College of Technology, Walworth Memorial Public Library, and Messiah College. She has taught drawing and painting as an adjunct instructor at Messiah College since 1982. Last summer, she taught a course on portrait painting for the Gordon College Orvieto Semester in Orvieto, Italy. She will return to Orvieto to teach again in the summer of 2005. Her work has appeared in countless journals and newspapers including CIVA Directory, American Arts Quarterly, The Bridge, and Prism.
To see Catherine Prescott’s most recent work, and for information about commissioning a portrait, visit her website, www.prescottpaintings.com.
Flora.
Current Projects
December 2004
In September, I will be in a group show at Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, Connecticut. This is a show of artists who have given a talk about their work at the Academy in the last five years and will have a catalog published with it. Many of the artists included in this show are people whose work I have long admired. Next April I will be a guest professor of painting for a month-long course for Gordon College’s program in Orvieto, Italy. This will be my third stint with the school and it is a delight to be invited back again. In August of 2005 I am invited, together with my husband, the sculptor Ted Prescott, to exhibit at the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University in Indiana. In the meantime I am busy with commissioned portraits as well as work for exhibition.