by the Moonlight: Making Good Work Takes Time

Salt and Moon 2022

*this post was updated on Feb. 3, 2025

Making good work takes time…

Visual memories, ideas, and a sense of direction for the work all need to cook in the brain for a while before bringing them to fruition on canvas. In 2022, I released a collection of abstract works called “by the Moonlight” and it was based on reflections, ideas and processes which had roots in previous work, building on those processes and ideas to hone them more. This grouping of work was abstract but landscape inspired so the pieces sort of toggle between abstract landscapes and full-on abstract works.

 Where it began…

Sometimes it happens that I don’t feel like I am truly done with an idea…it requires more development.  This series of work was the result of late nights sitting on the balcony in the summer enjoying salt air, moonlight on the bay, and the warm breeze while contemplating how to take my abstract work forward in a way which is true to myself and how I want to develop the artwork.

In 2021, I painted “Monument” , the last, large, finished piece of the work released in Fall of that year. It had a finished painting underneath which was ‘okay’, but it felt like it needed simplicity so I washed layers of color over it in various intensities giving it a layered, monochromatic, minimal appearance with lots of shades and detail underneath. Then I added shapes on top to define it. These were my first thoughts of processes I felt were true to me.

by the Moonlight, early release photographed in the studio in early October 2022

 For the “By the Moonlight” paintings I went back even further to 2020, to my first studio downtown where I settled in the same week of my 50th birthday, the same week COVID began to affect our lives in a truly serious way. It was there, in that place downtown that I was finally able to get into my creative process and truly understand it.

I am not a landscape…I am a Moondance

 It was there that I started work on “I am not a landscape, I am a Moondance” and began to really hone my personal style of painting. 

It is a large painting and it recently sold. Prior to that, it was hanging in my dining room for several months. I don’t have much on the walls in my home but this painting was special. It had a real sense of all the things I wanted for my work and because it was such an accurate expression of me, it was a beautiful addition to my home. Since painting it, thoughts of the process, meaning, and final visual presentation of it have remained vivid in my mind. 

“Monument” by. Cat Huss, 2021

Developing work, getting back on track…

The summer of 2022, I felt somehow, as I often do, that I was getting off track and wanted to explore more of what I had been doing previously so I went back to what inspired “Monument” to find my start.  The “by the Moonlight” paintings are an effort to go back to “Moondance” to explore its components and bring them together in new ways. This new series, both in process and visuality explores the rustic, primitive aspects of nature while being connected to the humanness of wanting to experience order. Its colors are layered with shadows, revealing only a few, hopeful bright spots. The series reaches just the right balance of dark and light, minimal and textural. At the time, it represented both where I am from and where I was headed.

This series of abstract works is all the things I love. Salt air, the sound of waves crashing in the distance, hints of moonlight creating colorful clouds. Delightful, mysterious, peaceful, powerful nature. Deserving of respect. The majority of the paintings are high contrast with all of the brightness and darkness of the world wrapped together….just how I like it. It is detailed and textured up close yet somewhat minimal from afar. As with everything, what was done in those moments painting that series gave me a jumping off point for future work and I felt, at the end of that series, as I often do, a real optimism about developing more work. As is everything, it gave me a stepping stone for future projects. Stay tuned to see glimpses of it in the future.

Cat