Cat Tams is bright and positive and assured and articulate. She sometimes has doubts and uncertainties, but she’s quickly answering them, and finding ways forward. She’s one year into her career as a professional artist. She’s sold paintings, she’s developed a personal style, a mailing list, she’s got a good studio space and many things are going well, although making ends meet remains a challenge. Cat’s got a different story to most graduates. She’s in her mid-30s. She’s given up a life of sporting excellence and then a teaching career to be an artist. She thinks harder, asks more questions, and has the benefit of life experience when analysing issues.

Roger Spence went to Bridgeton in the East End of Glasgow on a hot May afternoon to look at Cat’s work and talk about past, present and future. Along the way they explored how a young graduate painter works amidst the fashion for conceptual art and what it’s like trying to start a painting career today.

Cat’s studio, shared with two other artists, is small, but high enough above the surrounding commercial and industrial buildings to be well lit from the south-facing windows. She could almost swing a cat around her working space, but it’s tidy and free of clutter, with shelving units neatly organising brushes, oil paint tubes and other painting tools, and still life props including house plants, feathers, dried flowers, and ceramic pots. On the windowsill she has paint in production from pigments she’s ground and made herself. There are three small boards leaning against the wall in earthy colours – her first work with this new paint.

Cat Tams, Jungle, oil on canvas, 90cm x 130cm, 2024

There are very few finished works to be seen. She’ll have to show me photos because she’s sold most. Those I can see are typical of her intense, rigorously considered and composed very still lives. There couldn’t be more of a contrast with Cat’s kinetic energy. Quickly, she’s talking purposefully about her need for feeling in painting; about exploring colour, and linking the places she’s painting with pigments produced from that locality.

I draw breath and hold back the flow! Firstly, let’s prime the picture we’re going to paint.

Cat grew up in London, with no significant element of visual art in her life. Sport was her ‘thing’, especially cricket. However, she had some innate drawing ability. Her mother would marvel at her capacity to draw straight lines and perspective. Cat just thought that’s what everyone could do. She feels that her relationship between hand and eye, rather like keeping her eye on the ball at the crease, is a natural aptitude.

She came to Scotland to study Geography at Edinburgh University, did well, graduated, and after a year of temp work, including qualifying as an English as a Foreign Language Teacher, she enrolled at Moray House to take the postgraduate teaching course, and then taught Geography at Dunbar and Dunfermline High Schools. She played cricket for Scotland and Surrey. She was confident; a leader, a sports coach, an inspirational teacher. She got married, bought a flat in Edinburgh, explored the great outdoors, including co-running Duke of Edinburgh courses. Then she moved to Canada for two years with her husband, took a break from teaching; skied, worked in a shop and a café, and started drawing.

She’d always used the visual process to lead her class teaching. “If you see art as a language through which you can communicate ideas and concepts, I think teaching is an art. Good teachers are artists. Teachers who can take quite complex things and enable all their students to engage in that idea, that’s an art.”

She started lessons on glaciation by showing students the video of cyclist, Danny McCaskill, climbing sheer gradients in the Cuillins, got them engaged, and then started talking about amazing feats of geomorphology, rather than amazing feats of human skill and endurance.

In one school summer holidays, she did a Glasgow School of Art week-long drawing summer school class. She’d never done any fine art practice before. “It was really explorative and I felt really connected to the people. I came back home every night and my husband would say ‘you’re really excited’. I’d just come alive…something awoke in me. I went back into teaching, but I was thinking ‘how can I make this happen?’”

She had some time on her hands in Vancouver and occasionally went to galleries and museums. On one occasion, she saw a painting that captivated her and was key in the process of her realisation that she wanted to change her life and draw and paint.  The painting was Winter Trees by Franklin Carmichael. It somehow projected the same feeling that Cat felt walking amongst trees in winter. She bought the postcard and carried it with her all the time.

Franklin Carmichael, Winter Trees, oil on canvas, Vancouver Art Gallery

When she came back from Canada, the sparks from the Winter Trees and the GSA drawing week ignited. She didn’t go back to teaching, she got a couple of functional jobs – at Edinburgh Printmakers and Out Of The Blue – to support her whilst she started a drawing course at Leith School of Art.

Up until this point, Cat’s life was one of achievement and progress, but now art was a factor in asking questions, in challenging her confidence. She replaced leadership in sport and classrooms, and life certainties, with a leap into the unknown. Once you’ve started sowing doubt, your world changes. Why did she do it?

“I got to the stage in teaching where I was feeling totally drained and not able to take care of my own needs. I was envious of friends in other fields who seemed to have a much healthier balance of work and life and were growing in themselves. Teaching was fulfilling in so many ways, and I learnt so much, but at 28 I felt I needed some time to reconnect with myself and try something different – so I took a break and applied for a Canadian work visa so that I could lead a more active life in the mountains for a while!”

She arrived at Leith School of Art with no significant knowledge of art, and hardly any practical experience. She was eager and determined, and lucky to arrive at a place where she could learn quickly, but the questions and doubts started growing:

“I did the drawing course with Jane Couroussopoulos, who was just a really fantastic teacher, and really generous. When I initially started I wanted to do illustration, and I was doing drawing and printing to see if I could find a language. As soon as I started that course with Jane I realised that this was not something I could short-cut. This was going to be a long journey. I couldn’t do a two-day a week course with Jane Couroussopoulos for a year and a little bit of printmaking and then suddenly be ready, or to know where I fitted in this world. I needed more time to explore what I could do. If I’m honest, it was a bit reckless. There was a part of me that just got on this course and I became, not quite belligerent about it, but I felt I needed to do this now, and I invested quite a lot of our savings (‘our’ is me and my husband at the time) on that dream. Maybe irresponsible is the word. Quite a lot of the time I was thinking ‘I should go back into teaching, this is really silly… so many people can do this way better than I ever will, so what’s the point?’”

She stuck to the task and Jane Couroussopoulos’ class proved a very solid foundation.

“Jane did slideshows at the beginning of every day, and I made copious notes, thinking ‘what’s that? how have they made that?’ I was just fascinated by the whole world. I knew the classic names and I’d been to some museums, but if you don’t have the language it’s hard to access it. It was only through working on that course that I came to understand what drawing and painting practice was. It felt so infinite and exciting. There I was, discovering Giacometti and Morandi and…”

Leith School of Art gave her what she regards as a comprehensive education in art history through drawing and painting. After a year in drawing, she moved on to painting with tutors David Henderson, Catherine Davison and Matt Storstein.

“Diebenkorn and the Bay Area artists were a heavy influence at Leith School of Art. I was really obsessed by the Nabis group – Bonnard, Vuillard – introduced to me by Matt Storstein. He gave me essays to read. He introduced me to Andrew Cranston’s work. We went to the Ingleby Gallery and saw one of Cranston’s shows as a class. Jane introduced me to drawings. Matt and Catherine introduced me to the painting world. My education came from there.”

“I had to start again with painting. I had no idea how to paint. I was very hesitant, shy. Matt Storstein said I needed to make so many shit paintings before I can make a good one. He talked about the analogy of the potters. He said that you get two groups of potters and say to one: ‘at the end of this year you’re going to be assessed on who makes the best pot’, and say to the other group ‘at the end of the year you’re going to be assessed on the weight of the number of pots you’ve made’. At the end of the year, the group that are making the best pots are the ones who are being tested on weight, that’s because they’re just churning out pots until they understand the material; whereas the other group are paralysed by the expectation that they have to make a really good pot.

“There I was, paralysed by the expectation that I had to make a really good painting, and it was this understanding that I just wasn’t good at painting that was really liberating, and I could say: ‘this is bad, look at how bad this is… the colour is not working, the brushworks are not communicating what I want to say’. I felt quite liberated by the idea that I needed to make really crap paintings.”

“I made a lot of progress at LSA. I was awarded the painting prize and the Eliza Clifford Prize and that was the most important one for me, because it was awarded by the Friends and Patrons. They didn’t know me and they were looking at the work entirely objectively; whereas the painting prize was from my tutors and I think that was because of the commitment I put into trying to learn how to paint.”

That’s enough priming. We have learned that Cat turned herself from a novice into a painter in a couple of years, so let’s start to look at her work, starting from her first year at Leith in 2018 and moving through her further education to today: the professional artist.

She studied design technology at school – woodwork and metalwork – “I was obsessed by perspective” and so it was that her first mature works at Leith School of Art should feature this… “my visual obsession was with space. All of these pictures describe space, whether it’s a figure in space, or whether it’s a vast space of an interior or even exterior space.”

Cat Tams, A Day in the Museum, Mixed media Fold Out Book, 42 x 58 cm, 2018

If Cat wanted to prove to herself and those around her in Leith that she could draw, this was a powerful calling card. She manages to show off her ability to draw architectural space, floating shapes in excellent perspective, and then offering a multitude of specimens for close examination of her graphic ability. “It opens out like a concertina. It’s an explosive picture book. I love books and building books. That’s me capturing space in an expansive drawing. I am describing space and place through drawing. This was completed after three months on the Year-Long Drawing Course at Leith. It consists of drawings and mono prints I made from the collections in the National Museum of Scotland and Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh.”

Cat Tams, A Day in the Palm House, oil pastel on 8 panels of card, approx. 85 x 1800 cm, 2018

Later in the year, we can see her loosening up her approach, abstracting detail, but still creating a powerful tension, the encasement compressing the plants (and the air in the hot house). “I continued the exploration of describing space and place through drawing. This picture was made from studying at the palm house in the Edinburgh botanic garden. It was a large piece that was in the end of year show after I’d completed the year-long drawing course at Leith.”

Cat Tams, A Day in the Palm House, lithograph, 28 x 38 cm, 2018

“I learned printmaking whilst working as a Members Assistant at Edinburgh Printmakers, and this was my first attempt at lithography on an experimental lithography course with Alastair Clark. This was made using those drawings from the Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens in the tropical palm house and multiple layers of print from a stone. Lithography continues to be a challenge and a mystery even after time spent at Glasgow School of Art developing my understanding of the alchemy and complex processes involved.”

She arrives in the world of art exploring space, but there’s already a sense of containment, pressure, confinement, control. The air in her spaces doesn’t move. She had immediately started questioning her mode of expression.

Straight away, she was drawing to the world of nature morte.

The influence of Morandi’s work started to take effect.

“After completing the Drawing course and starting to paint, Jane invited me back to talk about my work. I had started to realise that whilst A Day In The Museum is very valid, explorative and very “me”, there was something I was doing that was forcing my pictures into being more than a drawing, as if I felt the drawings weren’t enough on their own. I’d never really understood that drawing was enough until Jane taught me that.”

“I realise now the value in a drawing on the wall: just one aspect of A Day In The Museum can capture the essence of the museum. I don’t necessarily need to create a pop out book with all of these different folding envelopes and intriguing parts… although that has its place. I also felt that I needed to develop my drawing language more. I needed to refine my language in order to communicate it better. You might say that the drawing in there is sophisticated, quite accomplished in its architectural and drawing rigour, but the expressiveness is in the object not in the drawing on its own. I had to almost create the object to make the drawing legitimate. Now I’m getting better at my drawing language.”

“Morandi’s dedication to painting and what he could achieve just within the parameters of painting the same objects throughout his whole career is enough of a challenge. A group of objects is enough to test and push the language of painting. You can see through his work (which I really explored at a Morandi retrospective in Bilbao) the academic rigour applied in the way he was capturing space and form. All of the information is there. We’re being told everything by all of the marks… to the end of his life where there’s a painting with seemingly a few marks, but the volume and the presence and the form of the object in that last painting is just captivating. The first drawings are amazing, but see how far you can go if just keep pushing it.  There’s something humble about the painting being enough of an ambition. It doesn’t need to be about anything else for the paintings to have a special presence.”

Cat Tams, Unfolding Time, screenprint, 37 x 19 cm, 2019

“This is a screenprint using multiple separations (layers) – each separation is a scan of an evolving painting of a line of objects, overlaid and combined with increasing opacity of ink to create Unfolding Time – a subtle and blurry expression of time unfolding. This piece was made as I was exploring the ways in which drawing, print and painting might capture the passing of time. I was looking closely at Morandi. His work continues to inspire and influence me. To me what I love is the restraint.  And maybe that’s part of my ‘thing’. I admire Morandi’s decision to say that he’s painting objects and light, and describing them in this very limited, muted, range of colour. He’s given himself these narrow parameters and he’s showing that within the context of those boundaries you can do so much. I need to work on that.”

Cat Tams, Silver Birch #3, oil on card, 21 x 15 cm, 2020

“Silver Birch was made whilst on the year-long painting course at Leith during lockdown when we were working remotely. I’d moved to a farm in the Pentland Hills outside Edinburgh, living as a work-away, helping to build and grow a market garden with a few other workers. It was a time of big change for me, particularly as my husband and I had separated. I cleared out a shed and used that as a painting space in the evenings and on weekends. Outside the shed was a silver birch and a tennis court! I made small studies of the tree at different points around its radius, as a painting exercise. I began to notice how each iteration varied greatly from the last - according to the time of day, the light, the weather, and my perspective and position relative to the tree. Together they were an interesting study of time and place: a portrait of a tree. I gave these pieces away to the patrons of Unwrapped – a pilot project that I was experimenting with at the time - sharing my development work (studies, sketches, drawings, prints, etc) with patrons who made a small investment at the start of the year – in return they received a small artwork with each season.”

“Some time later, when in my final year at GSA, these small studies formed a book called Twelve Viewpoints of a Silver Birch – one of three art writing experiments I carried out as part of my Glasgow School of Art undergraduate Critical Journal research - my dissertation. This experiment took the form of a narrative journal written in the first person. Each painting corresponds with a small chapter that brings together the ideas, influences, research, time, place and context. Writing became an effective tool for me in deciphering the themes and ideas underlying my work.”

Cat won prizes when she concluded her painting course at Leith School of Art, but perhaps the biggest prize was getting in to Glasgow School of Art.

“As soon as I started painting, I thought ‘I need to figure this out and I think it’s going to take me my whole life.’ I think that’s true still. So it was amazing to get into GSA and commit a three year period to drawing and painting.”

She could afford to do it through savings she made in her 20s, but the risk and money invested meant that every day she lived in fear that she’d made a mistake.

The questioning started as soon as she got to GSA.

“GSA challenged me to think expansively about painting, and fine art practice.  My understanding of what happened is that I was taken away from this purity of ‘I’m a painter and I’m going to make paintings’ to questions like: ‘Why?’ ‘what does that mean?’, and ‘what and who is it for?’ and ‘where does it fit into contemporary art conversation?’ I probably needed to be confronted by those questions and to look around at how art had evolved.

“As a graduate you’re inevitably going to have doubts, but even more so for me, as a mature student. The financial sacrifice needs to come to some sort of fruition for it to have been the right thing. There’s a pressure because you look around at people at your stage in life and feel behind.”

“I’m realising that there isn’t really an end point. Everything is building to the next point in your work. There are moments where I’ve resolved a painting and I’ve thought that’s done, but I’m always aware that it’s just a step towards the next piece, and I’m learning all the time.”

“There is a sense of knowing when you’ve achieved something. There have been moments of clarity, where there has been validation from people engaging with my work, people finding joy from sharing in the work. I like the work being out in the world and people taking it into their own lives. But I’m always aware of the limited impact; it’s like the process is for me because I’m enjoying it, but how does that contribute to society in any way? Painting is so grounded by space. A painting lives in a room and so can be limited in its reach. Of course, paintings have expanded out from those confines in so many ways too in contemporary practice, but I suppose it’s finding a way for me, and realising that if the process is made with rigour, devotion and commitment, the outcome will be inevitable. Teaching is definitely a place where I can feel I can share my work more widely, not so much my own painting, but to connect through sharing knowledge and ideas and facilitating someone else’s learning.

“It’s also the reason why I started art writing. I was asking myself: how could I share my work more widely? I wrote a piece called Picture Postcard – a conversation between the Carmichael postcard and my painting, Winter Trees in Sirdal. It’s a casual conversation in which it emerges that I’ve taken all of my painting ideas from the postcard.”

“Writing that book made my tutors say: ‘now we understand that something is going on in your head. It’s not just a painting.’”

Cat Tams, Winter Trees in Sirdal, oil on board, 54 x 70cm, 2022

“When I was in GSA, in third year, I was feeling really stuck. I felt really lost. I wasn’t really growing anywhere in my painting and I decided to look back at the work of artists I admire to decipher what it is that captivated me about them. I returned to my notes from Leith. I found the postcard I’d got in Vancouver, and I decided to make a transcription of this postcard.”

“I blew it up and I cut it up and I started looking at colour swatches, looking at how it worked, the negative spaces being more important than the positive spaces, the space in-between, and it was abstract and yet got such pictorial quality; the purple-greys and the coolness, against these flecks of really dark, warm tones. There was something very sophisticated about it and I wanted to understand it more, so I ended up doing some research.”

“Carmichael (1890-1945) was a member of the Group of Seven in Ontario, who were influenced by French and Scandinavian impressionists, and applied that to their love of Canadian landscape. He painted Winter Trees in 1918. I did lots of drawings in landscapes that meant something to me.”

“Generally, this approach helped. I started to look at what I was most interested in, looking at paintings again, and deciding what I liked in art.”

Cat Tams, Emergents, oil on board with hand-built frame made from reclaimed green-heart wood, 30cm x 40cm, 2023

“This painting was made from an earlier painting of mine depicting a landscape in Greece. I’d been fighting with it for ages! I couldn’t make it work. It was so fussy and overworked, and busy trying to describe space! And so one day I got a board and made a quick pastel drawing from the painting – it felt so much looser, freer and confident in comparison. The question was, why could I not achieve this feeling in paint? And so I grabbed a board and my paints and made a painting from the drawing: Emergents emerged. This painting marked an inflection point for me – a new confidence in using paint.”

Cat Tams, Life work, charcoal on paper, 30cm x 42 cm, 2022

“This is an example of my ongoing life drawing practice – I have piles of drawings from life. I started evening life drawing in Canada at the very beginning of my drawing journey and have continued to attend life drawing since – for the past three years I’ve led life-drawing classes online for London Drawing on a weekly basis.”

With Cat’s natural eye-to-hand connection, she can be anatomical if she wishes, and her perspective is strong, but she eschews detail and looks to capture feeling through abstracted body language, often with the shapes intact but drawn as though seen through filters or gauzes.

“The rigour and challenge of drawing the human form is infinite, and it grounds my drawing practice – forces me to use drawing as a vehicle through which to really look. You will notice the figure has rarely appeared in my paintings… only as sculpture or statue. I’m still trying to figure this out! Something to do with avoiding painting as a literal representation, or illusion of space and life.”

“I enjoy looking at paintings that are objects in themselves, with a focus on material, shape, colour and intrinsic flatness, rather than a window into a spacious world of illusion - a departure from my early work.  This is probably why I’m so drawn to modernist paintings, and particularly the Bay Area artists such as Richard Diebenkorn who combined an abstract expressionist approach to painting with figurative subjects in the work. The painting is a painting first, and then a picture. I feel Andy Cranston achieves the perfect balance between the work being a painting, and an image. So nothing new here, I’m continually learning from the development of painting through time.”

Cat Tams, Rock Paper Scissors, soft pastel on paper, 50cm x 68 cm, 2023

“The title relates to the dialogue between the form and volume (rock), the intrinsically flat surface of a drawing (paper) and the collaged shapes and sharp edges of forms that were emerging in the work (scissors).”

“It’s a self portrait from a mirror, multiple iterations of my head from different angles. Whether it’s representational or not doesn’t matter. I use heads generally just as a landscape. I don’t often work from photos and so I use a mirror or work from the model. If I’m working from you I can create a likeness, but I find it challenging to do myself because I’m moving while I’m drawing. I love looking at self-portraits because it’s so hard to get any kind of likeness from yourself.”

“Anyway, this is Rock Paper Scissors and it was part of a series of big chalk pastel drawings I did. I was trying to break out of my still life paintings. This happened before Family Tree, so I had all these drawings of heads and lithographs, all work that I had done that was not going into my degree show. I’d finished these still life paintings that were definitely going to go in the degree show and I had time. I thought ‘I could do some more work’.”

“I got my lithographs out, and just to warm up one morning, I got a huge piece of paper, used my head as a starting point, drew a statue (a bust) which was slightly animate, but inanimate, a bit odd; I then put it on a plinth and it was a turning point for me. I felt liberated. I‘d done enough for my degree show. This didn’t matter any more. So I almost made weird stuff.  It arrived out of me looking at statues in strange compositional, playful, quite graphic settings. I don’t know what’s it about.”

“I’d felt uncomfortable about the human figure being in my work, because every time I tried to put figures in work, it felt really forced – in paintings anyway – and making them into statues, making them into sculptures, it felt easier, because they were already one step removed from being organic, so they could be abstracted in a way that felt more honest.”

“Jenny Saville: there’s something remarkable about what she does – fleshy tones, so much volume, challenging and questioning the representation of women in art, rendering of the human condition on massive paintings… I admire them, although it’s not what I enjoy the most in painting. I enjoy it when human subjects have a real presence but to also have this flatness and less concern with representation. It’s me fighting against that illusion of the painting pretending to be something – a painting on the wall saying ‘Look at me, I’m a portrait of a person sitting there, can you feel my presence, can you feel my human-ness, this is me?’ But we know it’s just a picture. There’s something deceiving about it… It’s like having a representational painting of a beautiful landscape. If I want to be in that landscape I would go into it, be in it. But it's amazing when the painting is the beautiful thing, the object in its own right, taking its ideas from nature, capturing the feeling of the landscape in paint, revealing things that would otherwise go unnoticed. It’s a painting before it's an image, if that makes any sense?"”

Cat Tams, Untitled (1), plate lithograph, 57 x 76cm, 2023

Cat Tams, Untitled (2), plate lithograph, 57 x 76cm, 2023

Cat looks deeper into her chest of drawers, where sheets of works on paper and prints are neatly encased in transparent folders. My eyes immediately fall on two striking prints that seem to capture her signature fixation with flat sculptural heads, flattened plinths, and experimental tonal effects.

“I went through this period of exclusively drawing heads. There is a bit of a process between them all. They are drawings that I converted into a plate lithograph, printing the drawing onto acetate and exposing the image onto a big metal plate that has light-sensitive emulsion on it - the first one started with a drawing I made of a Giacometti sculpture. The second started with a drawing of a head from life.”

Cat Tams, Family Tree, oil on canvas, 120cm x 150cm, 2023

More heads on plinths pressed like flowers and set in two-dimensional arrangements of shapes and carefully considered colour.

“Family Tree was grounded in the research I was doing looking into art history. Firstly, the statues to the left of the painting are all taken from drawings I made from sculptures – two Giacometti sculptures – his mother and his brother, Diego – and one of them is from a beautiful book I found in a second-hand book shop on Czech nouveau sculpture by Frantisek Bilek. That’s the artist’s father. It’s a father, mother and brother. It wasn’t intentional. They were just drawings I had.”

“They form a family of statues that sit in a forest, and the forest landscape and the light and the way it’s composed is quite heavily influenced by one of my favourite Matisse paintings called Sunlight in the Forest (1918). At the time I was reading Matisse on Art. That was a book that Matt Storstein had told me to read. I read a lot of essays by Matisse at that time. This one, Henri Matisse Speak To You, is a letter to a new painter. He talks about returning to the languages of the ancient past to inform your practices now, rather than looking to what’s in fashion in painting at the time.”

“He would return to his Cleobis statue that he had taken with him and was always situated at the end of his garden, and he would use whenever he needed to bring a figurative element into his work, and every time he returned to it he would see it with new eyes and find new things and new expressions and have a different experience. There’s a lot about repetition, looking at something multiple times, and learning about it through time, but it’s also looking specifically at the language of this statue: it’s between the Egyptian and the Greek periods, the flatness of the Egyptian depiction of figures and then the more expressive Greek. It’s somewhere between. It’s a very interesting statue. It was ancient language that was helping him create his own unique language, when there was such an abundance of painting happening.”

“From that, I was learning that I should return to looking at ancient masters to help develop my own language, and not get swept away by what’s happening in contemporary painting today.”

Cat Tams, Understory, oil on canvas, 120cm x 150cm, 2023

“Understory was finished just before Christmas. It was originally a landscape painting. I was painting en plein air in Rowardennan, by Loch Lomond. I spent a lot of time down there as lockdown eased and you could move a bit. I’d go out there in my little van (I converted a little van when I was on the farm) and I’d sleep in the van and do a lot of walking and drawing, and in the run up to my degree show I brought these drawings into the studio, and when I graduated I had one of these big canvases that I hadn’t done, so I started a landscape painting. I went back and started it en plein air.”

“Honestly it was such a bad painting. I realised how naive it had been of me to think ‘Oh, I’m just going to take a 1.5m canvas down to Rowardennan on a fairly windy day and try and paint it on site’, and I did that and realised I had no idea what I was doing. I’d made this rather bad painting and brought it back to the studio and was going to work from photos and drawings to complete it. But as I was working on it I just didn’t enjoy it, and I realised that I really need to be with the subject.”

“That’s why still life has always been important to me, because it’s there, immediate. I can assemble objects in front of me and work from them; whereas with landscapes, where you’re working in the studio away from that place, I find it so hard to capture it effectively.”

“Slowly but surely I realised there was a pot in the painting and a bottle too. I started collecting objects in front of me again, and anchored the painting around these objects in the space with me. But you can see the trees are still in there, and you can see the landscape.”

“It’s the same with Open Spirits. This started as a painting in Tyninghame in East Lothian, a place that means quite a lot to me. I spent a lot of time there. I used to do a lot of drawing, and take a lot of photos in situ. You can see there’s almost a horizon line running through the painting. There’s a bunch of trees on top of the dunes that I was depicting. I brought it back to the studio and it became a still life, because I had some objects and I was getting so frustrated with this landscape painting - that weird, romantic depiction of the landscape feeling very clunky and forced. I wasn’t enjoying it, so I assembled some bottles and I put a plate down here and I got some flowers and I like the way that the landscape is in it, but it’s not there really, unless you know that. I know that it’s there!”

Cat Tams, Open Spirits, oil on canvas, 100cm x 120cm, 2023

So where is Cat now? And what is she trying to achieve in her painting?

“I’ve spent the year since graduating making a new series of paintings in the studio, some small commissions, working for Glen Arts on developing their residency project as part of a small team, and my regular teaching work too. It’s been good to apply myself to different types of work, and I’m hoping to take on/produce more work in each of these areas going forward.”

“In terms of painting, I’ve had a break for the past few months and mostly been working on a collaborative project with the GSA archives and a group of ceramic artists, and also researching earth pigments and out foraging to make my own paints. The collaborative project was a brilliant experience, led and curated by Katy West and Stella Hook, which culminated in an exhibition - The Past is Ever-Present - at Windows on Heritage at the Reid building.”

“Working with ceramics was something I began whilst studying, I was interested in the playful conversation between objects and paintings, and this connected me with Katy and Stella at a workshop they ran while I was an undergrad. I was delighted to be invited to be part of this recent project which involved exploring the ceramic objects in the GSA archives in creative ways, and led us to writing experiments, great discussion and conversation, drawing, hand building and peat firing clay, and the results were a brilliant collaborative response to the archives.”

“As a group we are hoping to work together again, and in the studio I’d love to make some paintings from the objects we made! The break from painting has been healthy, and great to learn from and with other artists, and I’m now looking forward to finding the time to paint again. So many subjects inspire my painting, but I see that there is a common thread emerging in recent work - exploring and learning from history, and working with museum and archive collections. This might be an avenue I build on. Let’s see…”

What would be the optimum situation right now?

“Finding the right balance between making a living and continuing to develop my painting practice! I imagine that’s a pretty universal ambition for graduate artists whatever their medium, and to work in a way that doesn’t compromise or force the growth of the material practice in an inauthentic and pressured way.”

“I recently did a small piece of artwork for an independent brewery and it was really enjoyable working with a brief, and with creative people. I’d like to explore that avenue more, which I suppose is leaning towards design/applied art. A combination of that and fine art painting would be a great balance. I also enjoy teaching, and it’s been really helpful to have teaching experience and qualifications as I’ve been able to apply those skills to drawing and painting workshops. That is a good source of income for me and I enjoy teaching in different settings and with different groups of learners. I'm lucky to be able to support my practice with that work, and I always feel that teaching helps to consolidate my own learning too - communicating and sharing ideas and facilitating people in developing their own artistic language.”

“I suppose the optimum situation would be to make a living from my paintings, and to dedicate all my time to that, although I get a lot from working as part of a team, and doing collaborative work - painting is quite an isolating thing to do full time! Part of me also knows that the paintings correspond with living life - it’s life experience and growth that feeds into the work. So being in the studio painting full time may not actually produce the most interesting work. So I think it’s about balance - and I'm in the process of figuring out what that looks like. Also, it would be good to have a show lined up, something to work towards, because then I have reason to invest time in making the work, and a space where I can share it.” 

How can we find a bigger market for art?

“It’s to do with immediacy isn’t it? The audience can watch a film and become very immersed in all of the sensory experiences of it. A painting requires time, and to go to it, and sit with it. Once upon a time when you went to the village church and you saw pictures, it could be the first time that you saw visually the narrative of Christ depicted and you would be astonished by all of this visual stimulation. Nowadays, visual stimulation is so saturated by screens, so people don’t have patience to experience a painting. People are over-saturated.”

All of us who are interested in art, and the future of Scottish art, should be attentive to the way our art world is moving; the way it relates to the public; the experience of artists young and old; its economy, its standards. Hearing Cat’s honest and well-articulated perspectives, I find myself recognising the hard choices and decisions that need to be made by graduates, grappling with the issues and the supporting resources available, trying to find a means of earning a living and still producing good quality work. It made me realise how fragile our world is, and the responsibilities that all parties – institutions, businesses, academics and individual enthusiasts – must take to support this little interconnected ecosystem.

Meanwhile, Cat Tams moves fast, talks fast, and in early 2024 is refining slow painting and still lives. She is preoccupied by making pictures that stand up for themselves: it’s the painting that counts, not the subject. She thinks she doesn’t need more of a conceptual idea than to paint a painting that has presence and feeling and can transmit that to an audience. She’s intelligently and methodically challenging herself. She is working on the same questions, the same ideas and with the same tools that painters have used for years. She’s clearly influenced by Cranston and Storstein, and then the major figures she mentions from the early part of the twentieth century, but none of them have Cat’s personality, her experience, her feeling for the world around her. Her steely commitment is forging a style that demands attention. Her work has a strong intellectual underpinning, but the pictures also have feeling, presence, personality. Her drawings, her prints, her paintings are already “hers”… and she’s only just started.

Roger Spence

All images are copyright of Cat Tams