Today we’d like to introduce you to Catherine Woods.
Catherine, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I’ve been an artist for as long as I can remember. I have a restless creative energy that always needs to be making something out of clay or paint, anything where I can get my hands dirty. It first manifested as a painter back when I was growing up. I was never one of those kids who instinctively knew how to draw or paint, and I was god-awful at first. But I liked the way a brush felt in my hand and I kept at it.
In college, I trained as a special effects makeup artist, which is the complicated way of saying I turn people into zombies for a living. Working as an FX person in the film industry satisfies the part of my brain that loves problem-solving and working in a group setting. It’s the kind of job where being an artist involves less pure creativity than you would imagine, and instead focuses largely around making props and prosthetics which need to be functional as well as highly realistic. It doesn’t always allow the artist much room for creative freedom. My special effects business is called Firebird FX.
Painting, on the other hand, allows me to access the part of my brain where creativity is a raw and intuitive experience. I get to look at a blank canvas, and it tells me what it wants to become. We get to have a conversation together, and there is no objective or need for the painting to end up at a specific place. My painting work explores the relationship between the female body and the female experience, and uses uncomfortable or jarring imagery to invoke thoughts about what it means to be a “woman”. As a painter, I identify myself under the pseudonym Big Mama Red.
My most recent series of paintings, for example, featured seven woman and non-binary, vagina-having people who were each openly menstruating. I used real menstrual blood (my own blood, collected in a diva cup every month) to adorn the paintings, and wanted to explore both the beauty and the undeniable nastiness of using real human blood in visual art.
I am a feminist, and that plays a large part in the kind of work I choose to create, especially as a painter. But besides that, I am very drawn, both as a painter and fx person, to things that are gross. I like to get my hands dirty, and I want to use my work to challenge ideas about what is beautiful and what is nasty.
Has it been a smooth road?
I think my greatest challenge after deciding to make a painting series about menstruation, especially because I chose to add real menstrual blood, has been getting over my own fear that everyone will be absolutely disgusted by the whole thing and decide that I’m either completely crazy, or worse, a total attention-seeking fraud.
Everyone has been surprisingly chill about the whole thing (shoutout to my mama for being a badass and never second-guessing the weirdo she ended up with as a daughter) but there’s always a little voice in the back of my head whispering that everyone is secretly judging me. I want my art to be loud and gross and uncomfortable, but I don’t want to deal with the repercussions about what that might mean for me. It can be a thin line sometimes.
Then there’s the more logistical challenge of this kind of medium. To be perfectly honest, painting with menstrual blood is, how do I say this, not-super-cute. I won’t get into the details, but the process of collecting it, storing it, painting it onto the canvas and preserving it once its been painted are all a little too weird and gross even for me at times, and I’m a fan of weird and gross. I like the effect, and the way it makes everyone uncomfortable to look at, but its still a challenging process.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Big Mama Red & Firebird FX – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
This is a difficult question because I don’t quite know how to separate my painting work from my special effects business. I think the thing that sets me apart is the fact that I do both of them. As I become a more experienced painter, my sculpting and body art skills improve. As I become a better special effects artist, my painting skills improve accordingly.
I also think that there’s something to be said for working with real blood as a painter, and fake blood as a professional. I know what real blood looks like, how it moves, the range of colors it turns between red and brown, how long it takes to dry. As gross as it can be sometimes, I’m not going to lie and say this information hasn’t come in handy because it definitely has. If I had a quarter for every time a young (and typically inexperienced) film director asked me to use real blood in his film (and I call him a he because I’ve never had a female director ask this of me… wonder why…) I’d have a jar full of quarters.
Sometimes these directors feel it will look more authentic to use real blood. I’ve never used real blood in a film before, but it’s not completely unheard of. In traditional art schools, painting students would study at morgues so that they could sketch out dead bodies and see what real human muscles and organs looked like. I don’t feel that what I’m doing is much different, except that no one (or their livestock) had to die for me to make my bloody art.
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
My favorite thing about Chicago is its rich and dedicated community.
There are so many supportive artists in this city who’ve at some point or another taken time out of their busy lives to teach me how to weld or stretch canvases or sat down for a beer to give me business advice. Shout out to Geoff Binns-Calvey, Chris Payne, Andy Jarosz, Jeff Sanderson, and everyone at Cirque FX for being my Chicago heroes and mentors and friends.
And my least favorite thing would have to be working on a film when we have to shoot overnight out in the cold for 12-16 hours in January. Chicago is definitely not the best city for weather.
Contact Info:
- Website: FirebirdFX.com
- Email: contact@firebirdfx.com
Image Credit:
JC Farris, Cody Corrall, Layne Marie Williams & Norman Pokorny
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