Everything I painted really was there, just not all at the same time.
About
I started painting in the evenings right after I graduated from college with a degree in economics. At first, I was drawn to the material itself: the smell of oil paint, the gloopiness, the satisfaction of mixing colors with a palette knife.
For fifteen years, I painted on the side, escaping to my studio at night and on weekends.
In 2016, two important things happened. I mastered oil paint just enough to begin telling my own stories, and, I gave birth to my first child. All of a sudden, I had so many big stories to tell.
My first self-portrait as a mother felt as though it came from the future. I painted it over an old painting, and fragments of the earlier image remained visible beneath the new image of my infant lying on my chest. I painted myself in pale blues and gray and the baby in warm reds. Where our bodies touched, the red seeped from me into the baby. Only later did I see the symbolism. The layering, fragmentation, and complicated intimacy of that painting would become central to my work.
After that, I began painting my life as it happened around me. I began working from photographs, eventually combining dozens or hundreds of reference images into a single image. I realized that a camera can capture a moment, but a painting can tell a story that stretches forward and backward in time.
Painting is an antidote to many things: the rush and demands of motherhood, the fracturing of our attention, the wider world beyond my control. It is a relief to come to the studio, take it all apart, and put it back together into something that makes sense.
Back and forth I go between observing and participating.
These paintings contain the world as I find it, but they also give me a way to imagine how it could be. More often than not, I find myself painting a way forward.
Caitlin Winner is a self-taught painter based in the Hudson Valley. Her work has been exhibited in New York and abroad and has been featured in Hyperallergic, Artist’s Magazine, and Studio Visit Magazine. She was a 2022 recipient of the Martha Boschen Porter Fund and a 2025 resident at Vermont Studio Center.
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