Open Yellow Star, 60" x 60", acrylic on canvas, 2019

Instagram: @catbalco

Cat Balco's paintings combine strong compositional structures with loose, spontaneous paint handling. Careful color relationships and trompe l'ceil painting strategies create the illusion of shallow, brightly lit spaces. Drips fall in all directions, seeming to defy gravity. Radially symmetric, and reminiscent of forms as diverse as stars, mandalas, or hand-written X marks -- perhaps signifying correction, erasure, or finding, as on a treasure map -- her paintings constantly affirm the center as a primary grounding orientation.

From T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:

Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving. . .