One human person, I make art with light and time, my eyes and hands. Reflecting the nearby tangible world. The things we see and those we imagine. In the street, the garden, the sky, the air. Assembling and arranging mere pixels onscreen. Searching for those moments when a tender yet ecstatic satisfaction appears and takes hold. Here is your invitation to explore! Love, Cat
01 The Wild Birds Know, 02 Once Upon a Time in the Neighborhood, 03 Universal Dignity © Catherine Rutgers 2026
A new portfolio in motion! • https://vimeo.com/catherinerutgers/reborn-pudding
Taking my time and changing over time. I am an artist who digs in the dirt, watches green tendrils unfold, looks to the sky, and assembles pixels on screen. I generate this artwork from my photographs and/or scans of the nearby environment, paintings, collages, found objects, and mixed-media constructions.
The “Reborn Pudding” project explores the power of expression and limits of control I experience when traveling between our physical world and the social-media arena. It began with @ziartcat, posting more than three hundred images from mid-July 2023 through the first week of January 2026.
The “Experience” video features one hundred of the original online squares, plus fourteen new pieces. Every image in the collection is documented with a pigment-ink test print and saved in four (rather amazing) notebooks. The digital and tangible pieces work together as a foundation for borderless transformation, from fresh fine-art prints to pop-up shows and multimedia exhibitions. And, yes, wouldn’t it be marvelous to feel the power of love become stronger, everywhere, among everyone. Peace up, Cat
“The Reborn Pudding Experience” • 6 minutes, 56 seconds of visual poetry • Click here!
01 Open for Reborn Pudding • 02 Plush Moon, Smooth Travels, Royal Flush • 03 Unfurling Future Peace Light • 04 Snow Falls in the Afternoon • 05 Hoops, Horses, An Emergent Resurgence • 06 Fire Dream Luminous Form • 07 Transition in Turquoise and Pink • 08 Extended Satellites • 09 Believable Sky • © Catherine Rutgers 2026
This apple was sliced and exposed to air, but nothing else about this post was “cut and dried.” I have been working and re-working it for months. First by making variations of the dried-apple scans of 2024. Then taking flight with new artwork and bringing life to the sequence.
At last, I liked the way it looks. But still tussled with what to say.
In the northern hemisphere, the First Day of Spring arrived on Wednesday, March 20th. I want this, always, to be an occasion for unbridled celebration. A time for completing my projects with passion. Yet news of the world, ominous on nearly every front, left me tormented and tossed.
It took far longer than planned or expected, but the unfiltered beauty we can sense, touch, see, hear moved gently into the scope of my vision and thoughts.
On the morning of March 24th, the cry of a blue jay flying by my window. At twilight, the outrageous song of mockingbirds on rooftops. On the ground in the following week … hardy snowdrops, purple crocus, the ephemeral wood violet’s shining dark greenery poised to cradle a riot of sun-yellow blossoms, and two small primrose plants already blooming through last year’s chilled, wet, fallen oak leaves.
Through the nights this past Winter, a cardinal slept – orange-red, puffed up, face hidden, protected in a tall and elderly yew tree, surprisingly revealed by a small patch of light from the otherwise obnoxious security lamp in an obscure corner of the brick-and-cement-lined alleyway.
There is a star inside the apple. Slow down, look closely, find the miraculous.
01 Resilient Skin • 02 Power and Loss • 03 Red Curves in the Kitchen • 04 Afterimage of a Beautiful Serpent • 05 Descendant of Eight Thousand Years (The Star Inside the Apple) • © Catherine Rutgers 2026
01 Ritually Lit (Image 0620), 02 Cold War Remnant (Image 2200), 03 The Harbor Lights (Image 0160), 04 8th Avenue Arty Party Salon (2001), 05 Innerspace Globe, 06 Vibrating Colors, 07 Garden Path in the Night (Image 2863), 08 Another Sign of the Vibrating Colors • © Catherine Rutgers 2025
“Quest” © Catherine Rutgers, January 2025
I’m in love with the physical world and with transporting color, form, and thought to the screen. Many of my experiments reflect elements of daily life and local environments. They always begin with my photos or scans, paintings, drawings, mixed-media collage. Some wind up expressing the intangible, e.g., the one above, a spirit animal to accompany me throughout the year of two-thousand-twenty-five.
CatRutgers4Art 