Catherine Drouin Goutal

A page of confidences

Dreaming of painting since the age of 14, I had the "luck" to be able to do my rehabilitation (after a knee operation in Paris at 22), by visiting all the Parisian painting galleries, both abstract and figurative, and thus train my eye and my critical sense to all these possible expressions!

I then worked in a gallery on Avenue Matignon, at the age of 29, where I was able to meet artists and clients, and thus enter the heart of this art world.

Leaving Paris for Grenoble, I finally decided to learn to paint myself in 1991, in Claude Blanc-Brude's workshop at the Bx-Arts; left free to move from figurative to abstract very quickly, I was able to unleash my creativity and especially my imperative need to express myself in all possible directions.

I felt that the two main reasons for painting were to express my emotions through the play of colors, materials, and by questioning clichés both in subjects and materials and the very supports of painting:

On canvas, oil paint suits me because it allows time to return to it, and the richness of nuances, the softness or strength allowed are much more intense than with acrylic, which is too dry and insensitive.

Each canvas being the subject of new research, I like to go against conventions and I have come to let the frame appear, to paint real-false and false-real folds, then to pleat the canvas before working on it, and then to build real sculptures with quartets of frames highlighted on the wall or on a base.

All possible experiments animate me and even gave me the inspiration and the will to create "canvases" for visually impaired or blind children and adults, an exhibition that I decided, prepared and organized in four important places in Paris (see my CV); this extraordinary experience, as much for me as for the children, was an unforgettable revelation that I would like to repeat for them...

I tirelessly continue to need to externalize my emotions, my relationships with the world (travels) and with human beings through this pictorial vector.

I was invited to paint in Russia and Lithuania, during "plein airs" organized to revive the Impressionists' "painting from life," for several years, another very enriching experience.

Other forms and materials have also allowed me to express myself, such as fresco and ceramics;

For the past two years, I have also been discovering the extraordinary technique of Indian ink, which enchants me with its speed in spreading on the support and creating improbable appearances. I have had a cult for all natural earths found and collected since childhood, to extract the pigments with which I will cover my canvases to become one with our Earth.

I will always carry all these contradictions and paradoxes of human nature and will try to "make visible the power of dream and the reality of illusions": it is a somewhat crazy gamble to want, through this frenzy of painting, to one day merge back into this Earth from which we, Humans, all came.

Catherine Drouin Goutal
CDG April 25, 2025