Cathy Hillegas, Rise Up, watercolor, 30 x 22.
“Serendipitous” is the word that comes to mind when learning the origin story of Cathy Hillegas’ prizewinning watercolor, RISE UP. “I’ve always loved the look of bare white sycamore branches against a bright blue winter sky and wanted to paint that, but I just couldn’t find the right tree,” Hillegas says. Multiple drives with her husband through the southern Indiana countryside on the hunt for the perfectly lit sycamore came up empty. “And then, one day, as we were driving down the road, I saw a tree I pass six or seven times a week, and the light was brilliant,” says the veteran watercolor instructor. “I was lucky to have come along when the lighting was just right. Another 10 or 15 minutes later, and the scene would have looked completely different.”
Divine intervention struck again when Hillegas printed out one of the reference photos she had taken. “I inadvertently forgot to switch the print orientation from portrait to landscape, so I ended up with a vertical image,” she reveals. “I immediately realized that was the view I needed to paint.” After settling on a tight crop, Hillegas invested more than 200 painstaking hours in the complex composition, working on and off from spring 2019 to early January 2020 to detail the intense interplay of light and shadow on the peeling bark and bare limbs.
Dramatic lighting and a zoomed-in perspective on flowers, leaves, and other natural objects are Hillegas trademarks. “I like focusing on something you might walk by and not even really see,” the National Watercolor Society signature member confides. “I then enlarge the subject and paint it on a full-size sheet of paper. Every painting is an attempt to say, ‘Stop and look at this. Take a minute to see, really see.’”
Find Hillegas’ work at www.cathyhillegas.com. —Beth Williams
This story appeared in the December 2021/January 2022 issue of Southwest Art magazine.