Meet the Artist: Cate Dayan

Meet artist Cate Dayan at Super Owl Breweing, Saturday Feb 4, 5–7pm.

Description of Work:
During the darkest times of the pandemic, while sequestered in her house, local artist Cate Dayan kept her traveling spirit contented by bringing the world into her home by way of her paintings. During isolation, Dayan filled her walls with bright colors of beloved places (both local and distant) to quench her adventurous heart. You Only Live Once, Yolo is a love note to her beloved community- a reminder to live life to the fullest whenever and wherever possible, and to consider our big colorful world, while taking direct action “painting” local change in our own home-community.

In 2020, Cate Dayan, along with teachers around the world, turned her multi-sensorial “living” classroom into two-dimensional digital environments- websites and zoom meetings. Interactions with her students and the world around her took on a new, flat reality, leaving distant memories of energetic children laughing unrestricted by slow internet connections to haunt her. To counter the surrealness of these virtual schooldays, Dayan mixed paint, played with texture, and engaged with an alternate form of two-dimensional reality. By playing with shadows, reflections, and light, Dayan depicted the greater three-dimensional world she longed for, giving new life and cheer to the dark times, the disconnected times, the “poor-connection” times.

Artist Bio:

Cate Dayan is a Davis teacher-an educator of young children. She is also an artist – a painter. In her classroom, she spends hours cultivating, imagining, visualizing, inspiring, creating, and nurturing the children in her care. In the studio, she layers color on canvas. As a learning community, she and her students strive to incorporate art into all subjects, adding richness, color, texture, and a deeper meaning to their learning. On canvas, Dayan strives to bring forth life, movement, and light. Teaching is an emotional job, a sensorially rich career. It is a profession of continued reflection, re-examination, re-thinking, and re-working. Like a new canvas, each new school year holds endless possibilities. Learning communities, like paintings, are unique, each with their own novel colors- interacting, playing with, and disagreeing with one another. Paintings and classes each possess their own beauty and their unique challenges. Dayan brings her ever-growing experience and developing techniques to her students and paintings alike.

Drawing inspiration from the confident, direct, and bold lines of David Hockney, the colors whimsically conjured by Wayne Thiebaud, and the strength and power of Melissa Chandon’s iconic imagery, in her Northern California home in Davis, mere miles from the two-room country schoolhouse in which she teaches, Cate Dayan paints.