Biography

Catherine Young Bates is a Canadian artist based in Montreal and Georgeville, Quebec. Her landscapes and still life paintings are on single canvases or in sectional formats. Large scale drawings and paintings are done both on site and in the studio, and in the past have often focused on the mythic flight of Icarus over various parts of the world.  Her recent paintings focus on an opulence of colour and emotion that can arrive only when the intensity of focused work takes over completely, after the the learning, thinking, and planning stages. The return of colour, after a long series of monochrome works, also coincides with her return of hearing, because of a very successful cochlear implant operation in late 2010.

Born and raised in Windsor, Ontario into an artistic family, her first formal influence was Kenneth Saltmarche, director of the Windsor Art Gallery. At Victoria College, University of Toronto, she graduated in Art and Archaeology, and was fortunate to be one of the last students of  Charles Comfort before he left to become Director of the National Gallery of Canada.  Other teachers were Babs Cogill Haworth and Peter Haworth.  She studied painting at The Baltimore Museum of Art with Keith Martin, printmaking at The Maryland Institute, and spent a year in Oxford focusing on drawing. She completed an M.Ed. at McGill University, painting with Gentile Tondino. Her mentor in Montreal was painter Allan Harrison.  She is an admirer of painters Marsden Hartley and John Marin, Philip Guston, Brice Marden, and sculptor Richard Serra.

She taught in the Fine Arts Department of Dawson College until the spring of 2002, taking intermittent self-paid leaves in order to paint. She wrote as art critic for The Montreal Star, Canadian Art, and other journals in the 1970’s, attending the opening of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam with a small group of North American art critics, including Harold Rosenberg. She attended the awarding of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize to IPPNW in Oslo, Norway.  She taught at the American School in Lugano, Switzerland, in the summer of 2001.  With Linda Shoet, she co-authored Drawing: a Link to Literacy, and is the author of Counterpane: Poems and Drawings.

She is represented in international public, corporate and private collections and has an extensive bibliography. Her work and more detailed biography may be seen seen at Galerie d’Avignon (Montreal), Roberts Gallery (Toronto),  Galerie St. Laurent Hill (Ottawa) and Michael Gibson Gallery (London, ON).