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"A chance meeting with the writer Kathy Lette, at Community Radio Station 2SER-FM, where I was volunteering time over the weekend was the beginning of the most significant mentoring in my life. Then aged 14 years of age, I tapped Kathy on the shoulder as she was approaching the lifts, simultaneously plucking up the courage to ask her if she was interested in perusing a folder of short stories and cartoons. Whether it was a mixture of pity, curiosity coupled with sheer human kindness, Kathy scribbled her phone number on a piece of paper and asked me to call her. I would visit Kathy ever three months or so, arms brimming with folders, and a mind more highly absorbent than every tissue combined the world over. Kathy was equally generous with time, as well as her praise and critical analysis of both my literary and visual artwork. Kathy encouraged me to take my cartoons to every newspaper and magazine in Sydney, and I swiftly followed suit. The cartoons were a combination of social and spiritual commentary as well as zigzagging between the sublime and the ridiculous. Illustrations were my way of translating an abstract view of world. Kathy told me when I was 16 that she would love to see me translate the colours of my cartoons onto canvas. By the time I was 19, I was safely nestled into domestic bliss in rural Orange, studying Fine Arts at Orange TAFE.

My pointillist style stems from a personal philosophy that “every point counts”. My art practice has been phrased as pointillist, colourist, and abstract expressionist. Painting for me is the alphabet of everything that leads to Zen. There are no hard and fast rules that govern my brush strokes. It is usually accompanied by some fun and funky music. I am neither precious nor preoccupied by the art of making pictures. It flows as freely as my consciousness. Painting for me is like riding an unbridled stallion across an infinite landscape. It ignites my senses it every conceivable way, and takes me to places previously unexplored, or unimagined.

Like strands through a tapestry, lives are interwoven with other lives forming a diverse and colour-laden pattern that is as random as it is rich with the pulse of life. That is what I seek to convey with my paintbrush, the intricacy, the intimacy."

Cath Grant