About Me
I'm Grant Catton, an artist based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I work in acrylics, collage, and mixed-media and I often work on found surfaces, and with found objects.
My Style
I draw my inspiration from the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and the bright colors of the late 80s and early 90s. My work is less concerned with representation and more concerned with expressing something essential about our inner emotional and mental lives. How do we make sense of the outside world and what is going on inside us? That is what I seek to explore. Again and again I return to Finance, Economics, and Commercialism as material for my work, because we are surrounded by these things every day, whether we like it or not.
My Process
I consider myself a "process-oriented" painter, in that I start a painting or collage first before deciding what it's about. Then, as I am working, thoughts and emotions start to come up and end up on the canvas. Process almost always precedes content. And there are no "mistakes." Everything can be used as a new direction. For me the challenge of painting lies in abandoning intention and going boldly in whatever directions the process takes me, and being brave enough to keep pushing a work to the absolute limit.
