Article by Article by K.M. Wehrstein / Photography by Kelly Holinshead

 You might be familiar with her landscapes from studio tours. Small or large, her paintings have a richness, complexity and depth that pulls you in to experience the scene. Colours are organic, natural and gentle, lines and shapes are multifarious. A tangle of branches is depicted cherishingly, freezing the moment in appreciation. And every now and then you see a lake whose reflective golden surface changes as you move, giving a sense of aliveness to it, like a portrait whose eyes follow you around the room.

Catherine O’Mara is strong in work ethic and meticulous at every stage – necessary traits for her Renaissance-rooted medium, egg tempera paint with gold leaf – and has come to a turning point in her life.

Born in Huntsville, she comes from an artistic family. Her sister, potter Susan Colavecchia, has shared in every show or tour. Her great grandmother was an artist and craftsperson right up until her death at age 105. Her mother paints.

“When I was a kid, I liked to draw,” O’Mara says. “My first day in school, I drew a picture of a horse and the teacher held it up to the class.” She was assigned by teachers to make drawings as teaching aids.

Once grown up, however, she didn’t start painting until she was in her thirties, her time until then taken up by stay-at-home mothering. Self-taught, mostly through books, she says, “I had an old artist’s handbook and looked up egg tempera when someone mentioned it. It sounded very daunting and complicated, so I read about it for years before trying it.”

From experience, she recommends The Luminous Brush by Altoon Sultan for beginning egg tempera painters and Egg Tempera Painting: A Comprehensive Guide by Koo Schadler for a thorough source.

In the early 1980s, when her neighbour Orla Irwin ran a framing business, O’Mara would help out while their two-year-old kids played together. “That’s when it twigged with me: maybe I should be painting those pictures,” she recalls. Around 1985, she started painting watercolours. Soon Irwin was putting them up in her store and they began to sell.

Then, after seeing a home-based art show by famed American painter Trisha Romance, O’Mara thought, “I think I could do this,” and held her first home show in 1988. For about 10 years she continued solo shows but began collaborative ones with neighbouring artists Brenda Wainman-Goulet and Jeff Miller. In 1999, O’Mara was accepted into the iconic Muskoka Autumn Studio Tour, which vastly increased her exposure.

By 2005, four artists on or near Limberlost Road, west of Huntsville, were part of this tour: O’Mara, Wainman-Goulet, Brian Markham and Susan Higgins. Along with other artists in the area, they decided to create their own shorter-distance studio tour, easily doable in a day. The Artists of the Limberlost Studio Tour launched in 2007.

After a 17-year run and struggle during the pandemic years, this may be the final year of the tour. If it does continue it will be in a different form. But this year is definitely Catherine O’Mara’s last in the tour, she says.

“Life changes and things come to an end,” O’Mara explains. “I’m going to start a new course. I’m getting older; in the time that I have left, I really want to do what I want to do.”

The pandemic had a silver lining for her: “It taught me that if I take a year to do a painting, that’s okay,” she shares.

Her year-long work, called Winter’s Rest, depicts a thicket of berry bushes crusted with snow and somehow makes this ordinary sight into a magical world of its own.

“I learned for myself that I don’t need a deadline,” she says. “I love the fact that I have this, that I’m working every day. I feel compelled, I have to do it, if I’m not painting I miss it. You need to be doing it. My brain is always thinking about it even when I’m not doing it.”

Egg tempera is what the Renaissance masters used to paint. Very simply, you mix egg yolk and water in equal parts, then add pigment powder. Things get much more complicated from there.

“I work from photographs. I’m not a realist, I’m not an impressionist, I have my own style,” O’Mara says. “When I first get up in the morning, I might sit and look at that painting for an hour before I do anything. I mix my paints – you have to make the paints every day, sometimes by the hour. Eggs are the most amazing thing; if you cook you know that. There’s natural oil, which is what cures that paint.”

O’Mara paints on wood, and has refined her board preparation over the years, adding portrait linen, painting the back to control moisture and making her own gesso out of calcium carbonate and rabbit-skin glue; the full process lasts a week.

Most often a painting starts out with a charcoal drawing; then she starts painting. Same as the Renaissance masters, she creates depth of colour by applying layer upon layer, since the paint is translucent.

“20 layers is not out of the question,” she says. “Because it’s translucent, those under-colours are affecting the top ones. You can’t blend paint on the board like with oils.”

Once done, an egg tempera painting takes no less than three months to dry. “They’re soft,” she says. “You can feel them get harder and harder.”

Once the painting is dry enough, she polishes it with a plain cloth to bring lustre to the surface. She is currently experimenting with expensive fixatives, the key feature being they don’t alter colour.

“You love the look of your painting and you don’t want to change it,” she says, giving a nod to a product by Lascaux. “You’re always learning; you have to be. I feel like every time I do a painting, I learn something about egg tempera or colour.”

A few years ago, O’Mara decided to add gold leaf to her palette. “I was five years with a painting before adding gold leaf,” she shares. “I did a lot of dreaming and thinking.” So far, she uses the gold to depict the surfaces of water.

“When you look at it from different angles and light, it changes, like real life,” she says. “I find it magical, find it very enchanting.”

The process of adding the gold leaf is anything but simple and can take hours. First you apply adhesive, and when it gets dry enough to be tacky, you painstakingly smooth on the gold.

“I have a special tool, a gilding tip,” O’Mara explains. “You touch it to the gold leaf carefully, lay it smoothly. No breezes; you can’t have it move around. I take a brush the next day and brush over it, to firm it and give it a direction. It takes on the texture of every little thing on that board. I’ve learned that it adds to it really. You don’t want it to be like a mirror. I feel like it’s almost alive.”

The inspiration for her pieces and her drive to create, somewhat unsurprisingly, come from noticing the details all around her.

“I need reference,” she shares. “I’m an observer, always was. My mother, my sister and I, we like walking in the woods and noticing every little thing. I often paint things that are outside my back door. A painting doesn’t have to be grand; it can be the weeds in my yard. I think of myself as someone who loves the littlest things. When you really look at things in nature, you see how intricate and complex and wonderful they are; you’re in awe of it.”

Art, she feels, comes out of the subconscious mind, and she does it in something of a zen state. “I don’t think about what I’m doing on a good day, I just paint,” she says. “The theory of it doesn’t come into my mind. It’s in your subconscious mind. It just has become instinctual. Not a lot of thought goes into technique or theory; it’s just the doing. All these things, my dishes, my garden, my flowers; these things are all in my subconscious. You’re gathering in all that information, over many years, and it comes out in your painting.”

O’Mara treasures the other artists who inspire her, especially egg-tempera specialists such as Gary Milek, Koo Schadler, Claire Basler and the best known, Andrew Wyeth.

Painters must have a great interest in their own work, according to O’Mara. “Especially with egg tempera,” she says. “For months and months, you’re living in that painting.”

She shares with Wyeth the tendency to spend more time thinking and dreaming about paintings than actually painting. It’s part of the process, as is insecurity.

“You have highs and lows, you get frustrated or tired or bored of a painting and you’re afraid that you’ve put all this time into this and it’s not going to turn out the way you dreamed it would be,” O’Mara shares. “But you can’t stop; you look at that painting and it’s asking for more. Your artistic conscience is telling you, you must do it. I know now that if I stick with it, I will be rewarded with a painting that I like.”

There are no underlying meanings to O’Mara’s paintings. “At a tour, if I hear people say ‘Doesn’t that remind you of’ whatever – this is what makes me the happiest,” she says. “I’ve made something they can relate to. When someone who has bought from me says ‘I look at your painting every day,’ that makes me happy.”