Sonia Katz Collage Artist

Sonia Katz says about her work:

I was the kind of kid who drew on every piece of paper I had. In high school, I went to an oil-painting class at the Grand Rapids,Michigan Art Gallery. We often went to nearby farms to paint "the American scene". I attended the University of Chicago,
beginning in 1939, and received a bachelor's degree in the Art Department in 1943, and a master's degree in the Art Department in 1946.

I married in 1944, and in 1960, with my husband and four children, went to spend a year at Cambridge, England, because my husband had a Guggenheim fellowship at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University.

Evening classes a the Cambridge Technical College made it possible fo me to learn making ceramic sculpture and also stone=carving using limestone. (That class was meant to teach students to carve letters on monuments, but some of us caraved realistic pieces. Mine was a "Mother and Child". We used the traditional tools--flat chisel, pointed chisel, toothed chisels and five-pound hammer.

Sonia Katz' art comes from a struggle to impose harmony on life's disorder and fragmentation. First, she creates the original harmony by painting Japanese paper with patterns and textures. Then she makes random arrangements of the papers, in relation to a background color. The unconscious powers of memory and fantasy suggest new meaning for these combinations. She builds new visual structures based on these combinations. The most discordant combinations of elements require the most powerful structures to hold them together, giving the struggle for harmony its greatest challenge. Motifs from the life around her are used to suggest meaning.

Sometimes the method results in an abstract harmony without realistic reference. Sonia Katz' work is meant to give pleasure to the eye, without giving a message that could be put into words.

Technically, she uses acrylic paint to create the patterned paper, and acrylic gel to glue the cut-out pieces on painted heavy watercolor paper. (the Japanese paper must be sized with acrylic medium.) The collage may also be made on canvas. The watercolor paper-based collage is matted and framed with plexiglass. The canvases are varnished with acrylic varnish and framed.

Sonia Katz and I had shared a studio for about thirty years. For many of those years she created beautiful stone carvings on marble and limestone. She also used wax to create sculpture that was then cast in bronze and she built large scale sculpture in welded steel. When this work became too heavy and difficult she switched to collage. Her work is a testament to the way in which an artist will aways find a way to express their vision, even when physical limitations may cause changes in the way this is expressed.