A donkey in a blue dress, bejeweled cat’s eye glasses, fishnet stockings and clownish makeup characterize what Fairfax Station artist Catherine Hillis thinks of some Washingtonians.
The donkey is Hillis’ winning entry in the "Party Animals" street art competition and exhibit. For the exhibit, similar to one held in Chicago, artists worked with large, identical, white fiberglass sculptures of either a donkey or an elephant, symbols of the Democratic and Republican parties.
Hillis titled her piece "The Women in Washington Are Beautiful — and Sophisticated, Too."
"The piece represents the antithesis of what Washingtonians think they are," said Hillis.
Hillis’ design was one of 200 chosen from thousands of entries submitted from artists around the world, and it will be displayed on a street in Washington. The show runs through September.
Conversely, Washington also inspired Hillis to use her art to try to "recapture the innocence" of national landmarks after Sept. 11, and she said she misses the camaraderie Americans shared immediately after the attack.
In "idealized" watercolor landscapes of the Capitol and the Jefferson Monument, she used "serene" colors like pink and lavender to make people feel "like everything’s OK."
HILLIS HAS BEEN a professional artist for 10 years, though she claims she "could always draw." A theater major in college, she designed costumes and acted in theatrical productions, working in a regional repertory theater for five or six years after college. But the long hours and the arrival of her children made her decide to switch to a career in painting. She still occasionally performs, but as a "celebration singer," performing in mini-Broadway reviews that "bring a lot of happiness and joy" to nursing home residents.
Working mainly in watercolors, she describes her stylistic range as "abstract to realistic" and her motivation to create art as "very spiritual." She enjoys painting what she sees in her garden.
"God paints nature, and I like to copy what God does," said Hillis.
HILLIS DISPLAYS her work at the Art League Gallery in Alexandria, as well as the Artists’ Undertaking Gallery, an artists’ cooperative studio in Occoquan, where she shows her paintings of still life and landscapes. Hillis said the Occoquan studio may be haunted. "Sometimes, in the morning, the coins are stacked in funny ways in the register." Hillis’ work can also be seen at the Occoquan Craft Fair, June 1-2.
"Her work is very good. … It has a softness about it, both in impression of subject as well as use of color," said printmaker Jean Barnes Downes, another artist at the Occoquan gallery. Referring to Hillis’ paintings of the Capitol and Jefferson Monument, also currently on display, she described their "idealized, fairy-tale feel."
Hillis has won awards for her work from the League of Reston Artists, the Art League of Virginia and the Springfield Art Guild, and she is a member of the Potomac Valley Watercolor Society, the Virginia Watercolor Society and the Art League of Virginia. She would like to do more three-dimensional work in the future. Hillis also enjoys decorating her home, which she shares with her three children, two cats and her husband, who she says is "creative in his own way."