K A T H E R I N E    D O L G Y    L U D W I G          BA  BARCH  AOCAD  MFA (Chelsea, London Institute)

Before all this moving to New York occured:

January to April 2006, I was showing 30 paintings in Gotterdammerung Norma Wozzeck at the Canadian Opera Company's final event at Toronto's Hummingbird Centre, watercolors of still life and children

visiting my studio. .   EyeforArt in London featured my work in their Artist of the Month web, and took a number of paintings traveling to group shows.   The Chelsea Arts Club in London  included

Giant Watercolor Son (below) in the 2006 Year Book, and showed my little watercolor of Evelyn Saba in the club portrait show Knowing Me Knowing You in that summer, and it was good to have a chance to

draw with the CAC at the Royal Academy (which went up in flames right in front of me on one of the visits!)  In 2007 I stayed at the Chelsea Arts Club Room 10, and just as I painted Room 8 previously, those

paintings have the life at that Club that sings (in my room with a piano!) in always great London where I was a teenager. 

This photo was taken (by Ray Stedman) at the Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts on Toronto Island:

While in New York, I continue to fly between the two cities to give watercolor workshops from the island where I have a studio space where I've made work in nature that is very important to me, in a really wonderful

environment of permanent and visiting visual artists, performers and writers: making my paintings there seem to be electrically charged!   This Giant Watercolor Batman Studio (below) is one of my five foot watercolor

island studio interior paintings.    I know this is a big website, just sample what you want to see. I've structured the web to record the paintings.  My CV tells the history of my work and shows.:  images linked here are

from shows back as far as Toronto, New York, and London 2002.  

Workshops outdoors are being held this year in Toronto cityside & on Toronto Island, where I love to paddle my kayak Marie Therese. (named for Picasso's muse).   Email me to book

for groups and individual students, working with an easy kit for drawing, watercolor, and oil: we go touring through landscapes and cities, experiencing a variety of locations (okay, & food). 

 Teaching Critical Writing for Creative Thinkers to 100 students each term at the Ontario College of Art & Design was always fun:  it doesn't matter how much the polka dot building on stilts

cost (okay, Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour architectural issues aside, I do like it, a lot), it's the people inside that make it stand up!  I want to thank my colleagues & students for being so

consistently interesting over the years.  Though I find I'm traveling to show and live abroad even more than usual, when I'm eventually back in Toronto I'll focus on developing a set of research

ideas for my PhD, specific to effective teaching.  You need everything to make it happen, the skill set and work ethic, you need mental and physical health because of the pressures, you need

a vision, because the artist is always properly the critic of society, as Robert Hedrick the sculptor once said to me.  When I paint socially through deep feeling I'm saying that it's the humanity

that is the source, and is the subject, and the reason to meet at the show.  What else is there?  How many white cube walls are we gonna cover, how much commodification can we manage and

still retain heart, how much money do we need: just enough to make the work that matters about our human condition.  That is my art contribution to the Whole.  That's what I believe. 

Upcoming: 

Now that the "Extraordinary Alien" artist visa has finally come through, I am able to travel freely and work in America for A.I.R., and I started off with the gallery's benefit in July 2007, Wish You Were

Here 6, where I sold two little word paintings GodBlessAmericaWishYouWereHere inspired by the Floyd song, and one I made as part of the The Exhibitionists group I joined, a painting inspired by

Peter Schjeldahl's "Beauty is not a concept.  It is the animal joy of the mind."  I went back to Toronto in April to help Jury the  Gibraltar Point International Artist Residency Program,  and again

co-curated the GPCA LTT Rogue Wave Biennial Salon 2007  (on the link you'll find information about the last one),  established in 2005 at Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts by the Long Term

Tenants, who will be showing work every second year, that addresses their association with the island, & each other.  Kicking off in conjunction with Toronto Island's historic Rogue Wave festival, it is

a great tribute to Artscape, which has been the catalyst for this diverse grouping of artists: thank you!   Next time in 2009 I will be showing work made in Manhattan called My Other Island. My favorite

but most difficult task of pulling together the work for the Alicebot in Londonland simulcast is ongoing, hopefully ready to show in London, LA, & Rome in December 2009: brilliant Dr. Richard Wallace

won the Loebner prize twice for his "most human" digibot, but it is his generous work with other programmers that I find most inspirational, and it is thrilling to study his achievement.  My simulcast posits the

idea of A.L.I.C.E. becoming sentient ....

Some thank yous, and let's do it again: 

The  Playboy Bunny Reunion  show of paintings at the Stardust in Vegas in 2004 was a trip!  My 13 year old daughter & I loaded up the Giant Watercolors & trucked across America, where I got ideas to

paint cabana boys, bikers, & billionaires. I want to thank the Bunnies for inviting me to be part of their first ever get together, we'll do it again, although not at the Stardust with those 40's deco rooms (it's been

torn down, we got in just by the end of the cottontails!) but there are still great days by the pools to be had, and I thank everyone for allowing me to portray them, especially stuntwoman Bunny Chere & lawyer

Bunny Michele, for making us feel so welcome. The print & television press attention was great across Canada, the US & Italy.  I am featured in the 2005 Da Vinci Paint advertising, and you can see it here;  

the Dworzak family is a big supporter to artists -- for them I gave a talk in 2005 about my use of color at Curry's Night for the Arts.   An excellent artist himself, Peter Large of The University Club of Toronto,

invited me to show landscape in a group show revisiting the Club's illustrious history of collecting the Group of Seven (they also have notable examples of outriders Goodridge Roberts & David Milne), and I thank

him for the honor.  Since 2005 I've enjoyed doing black & white cover art for the Karma Chronicle to support the Toronto tradition of this great food cooperative for all of us trying to get it right, accountable & healthy:

it's here!   I was glad to have the opportunity to show work for charities too, because it's easy forgetting how lucky one is by complete chance:  I donated drawings, paintings, & ceramics, in New York City for Artists

Space and Cue Art Foundation, in Toronto for the Arts & Letters Club, and the Ontario College of Art & Design.  In 2005 I also held a dinner to thank my past supporters, who have made it possible for me to continue

to make my art exactly how I'd like to.  For my solo show, Retro-Spective, at the Toronto Arts & Letters Club; Peter Goddard, Art Critic for the Toronto Star, keynote speaker, talked eloquently about the relationship

between Populism and Art Critique.  Here outstanding visual artists, performers, and writers, many I'd never met before, were able to see a group of my work selected from shows in the last three years in the U.S.

and England, and I had the discussions that make the hard work worth it -- the members are a seasoned and irreverent group.  I was thinking about the 1980's (just like beloved Peter Doig), since it was the time that

set my mind in its, what did that mortified/mollified British critic say before her prodigious strawberries and whipped cream dive, set my mind in its "bo-ho" bent ......welllllllllllgroooooovvvvvvvy!

I want to thank filmmaker Eric Weinthal for nominating me for a recent painting award, when he wrote:

                    "Dolgy Ludwig is a unique artist, not only in the vibrancy and pulsing life in her recent watercolors but in the way

                    she lives her life and develops her art in an unending connection that leads to exciting and unforeseen work. Has

                    anyone else ever painted past Bunnies as Dolgy did for the April 04 Playboy show in Vegas at the Stardust Gallery?

                    A mother of four, she managed to reinvent herself and her art (and expose her kids to more of the world) by spending

                    recent time in London, which resulted in many incredible paintings, seen at the Szuch House and in many other

                    exhibitions in the U.K. Has anyone else done a series of paintings of British policemen?  In moving from oils to watercolors,

                    Dolgy has followed the immediacy of the Muse who demands more of a relation to the moment:  her work with flowers

                    extends O'Keefe, the bodies of her nudes express more individuality than most faces, and the combination of texture,

                    pattern, perspective, figure and other paintings in paintings results in a totally new kind of work. She will receive a

                    retrospective show in Toronto at the Arts and Letters Club in 2005, and her utterly unique November 2006 show will

                    feature a fembot named Alice, a simulcast in London, Los Angeles and Rome.  A surprising work, but we should never

                    be surprised at the creativity, relevance and pure joy in the work of Katherine Dolgy Ludwig."

The painter/critic Neal Tait said in Chelsea, when my London studio was nasty, brutish, and short, but floor to ceiling paintings of color, "Katherine, can I please have some of what you're on?"  I've been so fortunate in my

critics and teachers, and I am thankful to Neal, Tim Stoner, Shelagh Cluett, Brian Chalkley, Chinkok Tan, Paul Sloggett, Graham Coughtry, Harley Parker, John Hall, Walter Moos, Paul Duval, Geert Van Der Veen, Landon

Jones, Dianne Bowen, Roger Greenwald, Marshall McLuhan, Stephen Martineau, Alan Bloom, Peter Prangnel, Bill Glassco, Michael Djeordjevitch, Richard Sanders, Bill Dendy, and my husband, Samuel Ludwig.  I didn't always

like what they said to me, but they taught me how to be critical of my own work.  I've been very lucky in my friends and family, who pose, along with the dog, cat, rat, lizard, hedgehog:  everything contributes to making the kind

of situation where as an artist I can develop new work right out of my guts.  Gibraltar Point, Toronto, London, New York, there'll be so many great times coming up, in L.A., Rome, maybe Siena, Venice, and perhaps even in another

dimension (University of Toronto Physics Department has been very helpful)!

Copyright © 2000-2008  Katherine Dolgy Ludwig   All Rights Reserved

Last modified: 03/04/08