Catherine Erb

born 1969 Memphis, lives Memphis

3 Tondoes

2025

mixed media photo encaustic

 

CD Faded

2024

frescoed mixed media on plaster on panel

 

In the 1980s, self-taught artist Catherine Erb was given access to a camera and a darkroom at her boarding school, which sparked a decades-long interest in art. After living and working alongside photographers in Europe for several years, she returned to Memphis and continued to hone her craft. Catherine Erb’s luminous photo-based works capture a spirit of the sublime in everyday life. Her practice is a meditative process that explores and reveals the radiance of the present moment and the complexities of relationships among people, places, things, and things unseen. Her studies of clouds transcend space and time with luscious translucence, while her portraits of everyday objects are instilled with the ineffable longing of memory. Her explorations of nature are sensitive and full, leaving the viewer with a profound sense of peace. Merging photography with painting, she has developed a method to create surfaces that feel both vulnerable and complex.

 

The Tondoes, or the round cloud artworks, began as a photo Erb took – from a plane, or maybe from the top of a parking garage. She then printed the image on watercolor paper and hand colored it with pastels and oil paints. Next, she mounted that to a birch substructure panel and coated the whole piece with layers of tinted waxes. The final step before installation is to buff the surface to a warm glow.

 

The flowers begin with a photo installation of fresh-cut flowers arranged on spaced, stacked layers of glass. She arranges the flower cuttings to play with perception and space – as though her viewers are floating in a sea of blossoms. The large negative piece of film she took of the flower installation is then embedded in wet plaster with solvents, allowed to dry, and rubbed until she achieves her desired state of real/unreal.

 

In both these processes, Erb’s unique perception merges reality with imagination, connects the physical and the divine, and expresses a deep reverence for memory and the present moment.

 

Tondoes generously donated to Calvary by an anonymous group of parishioners

Flowers generously donated to Calvary by anonymous parishioners