Catharina Breedyk-Law - A High Fibre Diet
by Sally Hansen
Cathy Law cannot get enough of her high fibre diet. When she isn’t sewing she is designing or drawing or teaching or photographing or collaborating or thinking up her next big fibre art project. Since her retirement from a rewarding and demanding career as a special education teacher in Kanata, she and her husband Terry have turned their new home near Perth into the perfect venue for her to pursue her creative passion.
As you enter the living room, two beautiful tapestries quietly announce her extraordinary mastery of fibre art. One depicts a traditional quilted medieval theme; the other is a striking tribute to her mother, who died of cancer on Cathy’s birthday thirteen years ago. The contemporary portrait is beautiful in more than appearance. The work was a collaboration with several of her fellow fibre artists, and represents many of the things that make her passionate about her flexible medium. “The possibilities are endless,” she assures me. “You can go anywhere from traditional quilting to experimenting with mixed media and painting on fabric. There are no limits to the ways you can play with texture and colour and form.”
Her playing has earned her an impressive number of awards, with pieces being juried into shows in the US and across Canada since she turned to her art full time in 1998. The quilt she made for her husband, “Terry’s Bears,” won an award at the Ottawa Valley Quilter’s Guild Show, as well as receiving the Viewers’ Choice Award. Her art appears at the Tay River Gallery at 28 Wilson St. W. in Perth (257-7195) and at the Side Street Gallery in Wellington in Prince Edward County. Her pieces cover the gamut from folk-art themes like cows and butterflies and dragonflies to wonderful modern art inspired by Klimt and Picasso and uniquely, thoroughly modern Cathy.
Born Catharina Breedyk in Holland, Cathy moved to Canada with her family when she was eight years old. She remembers pumping gas and flipping burgers at her mom’s roadside store and restaurant in Delta north of Brockville when she was twelve years old. She also remembers sewing when she was four years old. “I always made my own clothes. We used to get $10 bundles of fabrics from Sears, and my mother and sisters and I would sit down and decide who would get which pieces. My mom sewed because she had to, but I sew because I love it.” Today she owns five sewing machines, only one of which is an antique, and her ample fibre art studio displays many, many shelves loaded with fabrics and collections of threads, beads, art supplies and books.
One of her books is the beautiful “Portfolio 15” catalogue of juried fibre art works by Studio Art Quilt Associates, Inc. SAQA is a non-profit international organization dedicated to promoting the art quilt through education, exhibitions, professional development and documentation, boasting over 1,700 members. Cathy is honoured to have a piece included in the organization’s most recent publication. SAQA’s definition of an art quilt is useful in explaining Cathy’s approach to her art: “…a contemporary artwork exploring and expressing aesthetic concerns common to the whole range of visual arts: painting, printmaking, photography, graphic design, assemblage and sculpture; which retains, through materials or technique, a clear relationship to the folk art quilt from which it descends” (www.saqa.com).
“I’m a very visual person,” Breedyk-Law tells me. She is also extremely creative, and innovative, and she loves to experiment. “I hate rules,” she laughs. Those are some of the reasons she enjoyed teaching kids with special needs. Her degree in psychology and art from Queen’s University gave her the credentials and the confidence she needed to excel at one of the hardest teaching jobs there is. She invented the curriculum and the techniques to suit each student, and she relied heavily on art. Her favourite recollections all involve wonderful projects that enabled her students to participate together in the creation of something special, like a farewell tribute to a retiring principal.
She uses the same individually tailored approach to teaching fibre art. She has taught at colleges, quilting guilds and quilting shops across Canada. She also teaches classes in her home studio, and will design a course to meet your specific interests. From May 29-31 she is joining with fellow fibre artists Pat Lemaire and Wendo Van Essen to offer a “Wearable Art Retreat” at Opinicon Hotel Resort in Chaffey’s Locks. The three artists will be creating a kimono, a scarf and a purse, and participants can do any or all of the three projects. I love their course motto: “Wishing won’t make it Sew… We Will!”
It is a pleasure to see how much Catharina Breedyk-Law enjoys what she does. “I have no down-time,” she tells me. “If I’m home I’m working on at least five things at once, and they’re all different. It’s good for my body, and it’s endlessly exciting and satisfying.” She is learning to do free-form knitting to add to her bag of fibre options, and she is experimenting with the sculptural possibilities of fibre art. She is also signed up for several courses with renowned artists over the next few months to pursue her interests in “whole cloth work” (painting, printing and embellishing), and designing in black and white.
She loves commissions because she enjoys discovering what will make each client treasure their unique piece. She is working on a “Savin’ Earth” piece, and she would like to develop a series featuring her bovine neighbours, “but the cows keep selling,” she laughingly laments. If you’ve ever had a yen to create a piece of fabric art to wear, or to put on your bed or on your wall, you would do well to take a look at the possibilities Catharina Breedyk-Law explores. She loves sharing her art and her know-how, and she particularly enjoys opening creative doors for other women. As she puts it, “Fibre Art offers unlimited possibilities; it took a while, but I realized I could do anything I want.” Take a look at how well she does it at her website, enjoy her blog, email her, or best yet, call her at 267-7417 and sign up to try it yourself.