CATHY HEGMAN

Contemporary figurative artist Cathy Hegman is no longer sure where the paint ends and life begins or vice versa. To her, art is life. With a penchant for painting the unknown — the parts of life and painting that simply refuse to be defined — she paints figures that embody no particular persona but are comprised of  bits, pieces and facets of those who have in some way marked her journey for either good or bad.

The amalgamated resulting figure is both familiar, strange and often enigmatic.  The figure for the most part in her work is a two-dimensional shape that integrates into and out of the background shapes. It is a pigmented push and pull of visual weight that seems to give the painting life without giving either a portrait or caricature of anyone.

Hegman, who maintains studios in Holly Bluff, Miss., most often prefers her forms to remain faceless, diffused and dimly lit in an effort to keep them from being cornered and cajoled into representing a certain person or identifiable figure — one that might give them a specific point of reference and alienate them in some way. Wanting to leave options for the viewer, she chooses to employ loose, open-ended narratives in her work.

Having worked as a full-time artist for more than three decades, Hegman’s greatest fear is to create work that is boring or too familiar. She strives to push both the figure and the narrative out as far as possible without losing the dynamic of good design. Believing that we all in individual ways experience life with a similarity that is often not brought to the forefront and given credence, she paints the mundane and often ordinary thoughts and moments of life in order to illuminate a common linkage and form a metaphorical bond between the artist and the viewer.