The Artist

Catherine Lee Neifing (MFA San Jose State University) lives in Hawaii and California where she creates unusual original narrative paintings, illustrations for publication, murals, and quality reproductions of her painted and digital imagery. She works in both 2 and 3-dimensional acrylic media, mixed media, and digital imaging. The content of her work encompasses narrative imagery as well as art that is decorative, lyrical, surreal, comic, and spiritual. The artist’s subject matter consists of whimsical, colorful and often surrealistic landscape tableaus and interior scenes dotted with people, animals, exotic plant life, and symbolic objects arranged in psychically significant compositional patterns. Neifing’s paintings are stages for mysterious or intriguing activities. Her work evokes a sense of longing, of travelling to exotic places, of secret childhood hiding places full of wonder, of escape into beauty and nature. There is a sense of peacefulness and passion at the same time…of the hope of personal potential fulfilled somewhere within the dream image. The artist wishes to suggest a lyrical and cosmic balance perceived in both the sacred and the commonplace. She says: “It is my great joy to perceive and express in my art the patterns and realities which suggest the zany and zen delights of a cosmic order. It’s astonishing how the smallest things can seem so absurd and so holy all at once. The soul needs beauty, humor, order, spirituality, the rhythms of nature, and a sense of growth and life fulfillment. My art is an attempt to recognize these needs and to provide a visual reminder that we must fulfill our dreams…and that it is possible to do so.”