I first stumbled upon the artwork of Caitlin Hackett a few years ago shortly after she’d graduated from Pratt University in Brooklyn, NY. I was instantly mesmerized, and subsequently privileged to able to exhibit and experience her largest works during her 2010 solo exhibition, “Wilderness”. My amazement was compounded because, regardless of their large stature (they are four and five feet in varying dimensions), they exude the same gentle and inviting intimacy as do miniature works of art. Therein lies a blissful uncanniness: this intimacy combined with the larger-than-human size, suspends reality in arresting ways, offering to its viewer a chance to synesthetically experience one of Caitlin’s myriad invented worlds.
Caitlin prefers to work in large formats, yet lately she’s been limited to working on small things due to a large amount of commissioned work she’s been asked to do. Tattoo designs, small drawings, album artwork keep her working on her small desk rather than on the floor, her preferred drawing location. Not that I’m complaining – Her small works are, of course, also wonderful and delightful. I was extremely excited when, a few months ago, she told me she had been commissioned to illustrate one of a series of fairytale books being republished by the English book publisher, Folio Society. The Rainbow Fairy Tale Book series, originally edited by Andrew Lang back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contain some of the most beguiling illustrations of that era. Dark and spidery black lines depict princes, fairies, ogres, dragons and all sorts of fae folk spread amongst a series of 12 hard-bound books. While the title of the series sounds corny to our 21st century ears, the series of stories more closely reflect the style of the era from which they originate. They were compiled and edited intelligently, are very extensive and contain a very dark streak. The Folio Society is, book by book, bringing in contemporary illustrators who excel in intricate, fanciful lines and form to recreate this amazing series. Caitlin’s style, a Walton Ford meets Arthur Rackham, is a perfect addition.
A couple of months ago, Caitlin kindly spent some time talking with me about aspects of her work and practice in a recent interview and studio visit:
Samantha Levin: You’ve got some very dark elements in your imagery, yet you are not a dark person. How did this wind up in your artwork?
Caitlin Hackett: When I was very young I was obsessed with not only animals and nature, but also fantasy, I read voraciously and lived in very much my own world mentally. I loved the idea of having magical powers with which to fight evil, a dream I know I shared with many children. I invented myriad worlds, and wrote many stories and poems revolving around these other worlds, and thought always that there must be something more, a way to transform, a way to escape this world, if I could only find the right wardrobe or a ring of mushrooms. However as I got older I realized that no amount of wishful thinking, or writing or dreaming, could make these worlds any more tangible than they were, they would always exist only in my own mind, and no where else. While this is similar to many peoples’ youths, it was particularly crushing for me, and I went through a period of deep depression when I was around 11. I always felt very powerless to protect the things I cared about, and I had a great passion for animals and for forests and personified all the animals and even the plants in my life, I felt very connected to them. I was a very emotional child, if I saw someone throwing rocks at a cat, or talking about hunting wolves, or even sawing branches off of trees, it would set me to tears.
However in the long run, I had a very happy childhood, full of odd dreams and forts in the woods and secret languages between friends. Ultimately I realized I would have to make my own magic, if it did not exist, and I would have to find a way to protect the things I care for. It is in that way that I have proceeded with my art, which reflects a natural world that I find both beautiful and brutal. I am obsessed with the idea of wilderness, with forests and wild mountains, and there is perhaps still a bit of the childhood dreamer in me, who hopes that deep in those woods there lies the other worlds I once wrote of. But it also comes from a deep respect for nature, taught to me at a young age by my parents and learned from living on the wild northern coast of California. The natural world I recreate in my art is both the home of my many mystical childhood dreams, and a ravaged land, torn at from all sides, savage and fragile. It is odd, because I still hold onto a rather romantic notion about the natural world, a sense of mystical purity that I feel certain deep forests must hold, but I know that even this is not the whole picture, because the lives of animals are often brutal, and people are more brutal to nature still. I guess this is a rather rambling answer, but to round it off, I am in awe of the beauty of the world; there is no shortage of wonder in nature and in people, and I see that everywhere I go. But there is rarely a moment that I am not aware too of the ugliness and the loss, and it is what brings the darkness into my work.
SL: You’re currently involved in a project that is republishing Andrew Lang’s Rainbow Fairy Tale Books that were originally published back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While your work can be compared to the intricate illustrative styles contained in these old books, the concepts behind your work are much more modern. What do you think about the old stories they contain? Are you adapting your work to them easily or is this a bit of a challenge?
CH: I very much enjoy the old stories, I never knew of these books as a child but I would have loved them, I was always an avid reader of fairy tales and folk lore. I like the older stories because they are not necessarily all lightness and joy, these stories are full of mischief and heroics, strange fae folk, talking animals, kidnappings and lost princes and a certain grimness that satisfies my more modern taste. They are also very fantastical, full of transformations and magic, which I enjoy drawing, especially the animal transformations. It’s been entertaining to work on, and fits my style rather well although I do have to draw more people than I have been used to for a while, since I rarely draw entire human bodies in my own work. Also the drawings are on a very small scale, which has been the hardest thing for me to get used to, I actually find it very challenging to do small pieces, and the composition of them takes more thought and time for me than for many of my larger pieces which I tend to work straight onto in a looser fashion, whereas these illustrations I put a great deal of planning into to make sure that the scenes I create capture the moment in the story exactly as I want.
SL: Tell me about these small puppet sculptures you’ve got in your studio? They’re great! Have you done much 3-d work and would you like to do more?
CH: I haven’t done that much 3-D work, but I really enjoy it. The little puppet bits that I have in my studio I actually created while on artist residency at OxBow years ago, where I met a young woman who was studying puppetry, and she and I made a few puppets together and she actually put on a puppet show. She taught a few of us other residents how to make the puppets, including my friend and fellow illustrative artist Chris Mrozik, who makes some amazing little creature sculptures. I always meant to make more puppets, and to finish the bodies for the ones that I already have, but among all my other projects those somehow slipped through the cracks. I would love to create more of them though, they’re pretty easy to make, I even have the modeling clay to use as the base, I just have to get more wallpaper paste for the paper mache, it’s a relatively simple process to make them, the hardest part for me was pulling the clay back out of the hardened paper mache form, because I always want to make tiny little horns and appendages, and those are nearly impossible to take the clay back out of. Puppetry is another of my sort of back burner passions you could say, like wildlife biology, it’s something I would love to pursue, and have a lot of ideas for, but I just haven’t had the time of actually do it. I would love to create larger puppets too, but using the same sort of low brow, easy materials as the small ones. I think it would be amazing to work with a puppeteering company for a while as well, but for now my show schedule and commission work keep me a bit too preoccupied for my puppets, but hopefully someday I’ll get back to them again.
SL: Tell me how your style evolved.
CH: This is always a hard question for me to answer, I have always loved to draw animals, and I have always loved very detailed illustration, all of my favorite children’s books and fairy tales when I was young had very intricate illustrations in them. I had all of Brian Frouds’ fairy books, many books of dragons, old irish fairy tales, books of sea creatures, skeletons, the illustrated guide to cats, etc. I also always loved nature and the natural sciences, and my father was an avid collector of books of birds and plants from the Pacific Northwest, so I would always look through those, and loved the way the birds were painted and drawn, that kind of vintage illustration style. I can’t say that I really thought or planned out my style, it was simply what I was drawn to in art so I suppose I emulated that. I always liked things with tiny details, little narratives that you really had to study the drawing to see all of. I always enjoyed using water colors and colored pencils, but my work was always line based, when I was younger I worked mostly with pencils, but also in school with a lot of ballpoint pens since that was what I had readily available. I always had a sketchbook on me, all through middle and high school, and I still have them all at home, they’re like a visual diary. It was after I saw Walton Fords work that I realized that I really could, as an artist, just draw what I was passionate about, instead of feeling as though I had to fit into a certain artistic canon so to speak and do oil paintings and nudes. I find the human figure to be beautiful in an ungainly way, but it is animals that I enjoy drawing the most, although I work human limbs into many of them. I am interested in the way the human body is similar to that of other species, the idea of hands operating like paws, or arms as wings, that kind of thing. Even when I was young when I would draw I created a lot of anthropomorphic creatures, it was something I always appreciated in fairy tales, the fluidity with which people and animals could change forms, and this idea of changelings being left in place of real babies and living their lives like that. All of these tales and myths affected my art and are still referenced in it today.
SL: What’s your dream project? If you had no constraints and could work on anything you wanted, what would you do?
CH: Well I have several large pieces I have had sitting in studio for months now, that I haven’t had a chance to work on due to how many commission and show pieces I’ve had to create, so I would love to be able to work on those. I have on that’s 7ft by 5ft of a deer woman that I’ve literally had for over a year, and I am dying to finish it. I also have half a dozen other large pieces I’ve had the concepts for floating around in my head, that I would love to have a chance to actually execute. I have also had in mind a picture book of masquerade characters that I would like to illustrate and put together, that I’ve been planning for over a year now. I would love to do more 3 dimensional work as well, do some kind of medium sized creatures using paper mache and draw on top of them, a bit like Rune Olsen’s work but a bit more multi media, sort of like the puppets from the dark crystal, that kind of thing. There are so many projects that I’ve had in mind, many of them for many years, and a few of which I’ve started chipping away at, but far too many of them have just sat undone in the back of my mind while I work on themed shows and commissions. Time goes by so fast, a day, a week, a month, are gone before I even realize it, it can be hard to fit everything in, especially with my current commission load and the amount of time it can take to make even one piece, especially since with the commission work there is so much back and forth between me and the client, it adds weeks of time to the projects. In any case, I dream of finishing some of my large pieces, and starting the new large ones I’ve had in mind, but for now I’m just chipping away at some of my smaller personal projects and digging into a stream of new commissions for the winter and spring.
The Folio Society asked that I not post any of the photos I took of the illustrations-in-progress that Caitlin has been doing for their book, however I assure you, they are quite stunning. I hope to be able to share them after publication. Many thanks to Caitlin for spending her valuable time to let me peer into her studio! I most definitely will be checking in on here from time to time to see what else develops.
