New Small Scale Painitngs: Notes on my Sources and Process
American nineteenth-century penmanship workbooks have intrigued me for over a decade. My interest in mark-making from that era has led me to incorporate into paintings everything from rigidly schooled handwriting exercises to the freeform scrawls of a daydreamer. Liberated from rules, the unselfconscious marginalia of the era still exudes the influence of rigorous Spencerian training in proper penmanship.

Liner Notes (Red Tail), 2009, oil on canvas

Handwriting artifacts, transferred from original sources using a variety of printmaking techniques, are really just the starting points for my work. From there, I deconstruct—destroy (blur, smear, wipe)—what I’ve placed onto a canvas. The remaining vestiges give me ideas for where to proceed. Eventually I have enough loose ends that a logic emerges for pulling them together into a new kind of whole. Color is paramount and I use it in layers. I think of the layers as periods of historical time: looking through them is analogous to peering back into the nineteenth century. Placing text into these strata gives the work humanity. I prefer using the neutral text that I encounter, such as letters of the alphabet, numbers, work-a-day calculations, words from penmanship copybooks, or the arithmetic related to the various trades, e.g. bricklayers or surveyors.
The dark meandering lines in my most recent work stem from my immersion in Victorian ephemera. These tendrils reflect or play with quoted fragments within each painting. It feels to me that these lines draw themselves, slowly. They lead, and I follow.

Catherine Courtenaye

2009

GHOSTWRITERS
March 7 – April 7, 2007  Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts
These paintings are the outcome of my exploration of 19th-century vernacular penmanship. Handwriting manuals were legion at that time, a central part of a national craze for self-improvement that was sweeping America—even the remote reaches of homesteads in the West. Vestiges of elementary mark-making—alphabets, signatures, animals, equations—serve as counterpoints to my looser treatment of line, edge and space. One hundred and fifty years later, my paintings navigate between the rigors of those perfect lines and my own imperfect brushes. 

Circumference (detail) 60 x 72 inches,

2006, oil on canvas

The personal signatures of men and women living in mid-19th century America reflect the universal indoctrination into Spencerian penmanship. Penmanship training, in pursuit of a certain standarized perfection in handwriting, emphasized the negation of the individual hand. Of late, I have become particularly interested in ferreting out those instances of deviation from the rules of writing. The simultaneous, conflicted Victorian longing for convention and the passion for flourished excess can be detected in the signatures of everyday people.
In uncovering marginalia and doodles on workbook endpapers of the period, one can see the human impulse to let the mind stray, with pen in hand. Although we think of doodles as liberated from any rules, in these quoted artifacts one can see the influence of typical Spencerian training in proper penmanship, thus placing the scrawls and wiggles into historical context. Digital technology has replaced the handwritten page—but the doodle will forever remain a form of self-expression.
The penmanship instructor’s original intent of control, resolution and clarity is often obscured by placing these lines and letters into deep fields of saturated color. But what emerges, I hope, is a reanimation of these strokes and perhaps a reconsideration of the expressiveness of the written word.

Catherine Courtenaye

Summer 2006