When I wasn’t playing dolls, I always drew pictures of anything I saw. At twelve years old I wanted to go to art school. I did meet a friend on the mainland, because we were the only family on the island. I wanted to go to art school with her, and my parents thought it wasn’t the thing for young ladies to do, to spend their time going to art school. My parents never sent me to school.  So at that point I didn’t know how to read (I’ve never been a good reader or a speller, but thank goodness I was able to paint (laughter) because that filled up my life). Anyway my parents said no, they would not spend any money to send me to a frivolous thing like going to an art school. Being a very determined person and very willful, I decided I would find a way. On the edge of the island where there was sand all around, I collected shells, and I started making place cards. My mother did buy me the place cards to get started. I found out I could sell them at a gift shop. At the age of twelve I made enough money to pay for that semester--it was just a life drawing class--and I did that for two years. I sort of got a headstart on a lot of people.

Then my parents sent me away to boarding school. Unfortunately that was the year my father committed suicide. I was fifteen. At this boarding school I went to (it was for prep school and junior college) luckily we had a wonderful, wonderful art teacher. His name was Leon Kroll. He was a master of drawing, and he was doing murals for the Justice Building in Washington at the time and he was very important in that era. Anyway, he noticed that I could draw (I had already had a couple of years of this drawing), so he made a big point of helping me out.  I think he was the mainstay of my life. 

Eventually, I got married at twenty. By the time I was twenty-six I already had four children. I was going to repopulate the earth  (laughter). Anyway, I did at one point go to Hans Hofmann in New York City. Unfortunately I was only there a month and I was only going two days a week because I had all these babies at home. At this time I think I was thirty-two, and I fainted in his class. They got an ambulance and took me to the hospital. I had tuberculosis, so I was in bed for a whole year.

I thought of all the things I had to have, it was very good I had tuberculosis.  I had read about artists, and one of the main things artists had was tuberculosis, so I figured I was made. I had the proper disease if I was going to have anything. 

One of the funny things when I was in bed---in those days people went to bed----I was still doing anatomy. I had taken art books to bed, and so in the daytime I would draw bosoms and legs and hands and arms,. and things likethat. From one to two you were supposed to take a nap and I never did. I used to get up and stand on the bed and tape these drawings to the ceiling. As I lay there the hour I was supposed to be sleeping, I would study what I had done. One time I heard the nurse out in the hall of the hospital I was in, “Get a load of the lady in seventeen. She’s some kind of sex maniac. She’s got bosoms and fannies and legs all on her ceiling!” Nobody could quite understand what I was doing while I was in bed.

I am now working at the Vermont Studio Center, and I have been here for a month. The funny thing about this is I came at the age of eighty-one and yesterday I had a birthday. So I’ve been here one month, and I am leaving a year older. Now just figure that one out!

Catherine “Catchi” Childs.  Painter.  Manhasset, Long Island, New York.  Past president of the National  Association of Women Artists, Catchi Childs studied with Leon Kroll and Hans Hofmann.   Ms. Childs has a distinguished exhibition history in notable New York galleries.

http://www.catchiart.com

My name is Catchi Childs. I am a painter. Actually I have been painting for seventy years. It’s a very long time.  I thought it might be interesting to tell you how I started.

My parents lived on an island in Florida (and by the way I do live in America , in the USA; I live in Manhasset, Long Island). Both my parents were alcoholics. Really I was the only child, and they there more or less interested in what they were doing, They had a captain and a boat, and they used to go fishing every day and sometimes for a week, two weeks at a time and they knew all the important people in fishing and so forth. I was left to my own devices, and so I loved dolls, and I played dolls every day.  I had a straw house made of palm trees, and I kept my dolls there.

Catherine "Catchi" Childs