Share this
Catie Cook is a figurative oil painter whose work investigates her experiences of girlhood in the American South through the lens of performance. Employing the Dalmatian as a proxy for herself, she explores the parallel performances of beauty in show dogs and Southern women, using the symbol of the stage as a metaphor for the performativity of gender. Cook (b. 2001, Griffin, GA) holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Georgia, with an emphasis in painting, art history, and museum studies. In 2025, she earned her Master of Fine Arts from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts in St. Louis, Missouri.
Hi Catie! It’s a pleasure to sit down with you! First question that I always ask. How does a regular day look like for you in St. Louis?
Catie: Twice a week I teach intro painting and 2D Design, so I spend all day at school. The other 5 days, I’m usually sleeping in until around 10. I like to start my day with movement, whether that’s a walk or pilates class, then I try to spend as many uninterrupted hours painting as possible. I’ll usually work until dinner time. When I’m on a deadline like I’ve been recently, at least a few times a week, I’ll go back to painting after dinner and work until I’m ready to get in bed.
I’m curious, growing up, what was life like there? And what kind of kid were you? What did you enjoy doing?
Catie: I grew up in between the suburbs and the mountains. My parents didn’t believe in kids playing video games or watching too much tv so I spent most of my time playing outside. I really loved camping, going on the river, climbing trees. I also have two sisters and the three of us were always creating our own worlds. We particularly loved playing with dolls and stuffed animals and making really elaborate backstories for them. We were sort of your classic little girls pretending we were fairies and having tea parties but we were also dirty a lot of the time and always barefoot.
Do you remember approximately at what age your creative side started to show? And when did you start taking being an artist seriously?
Catie: Yeah, I was super lucky that my grandmother was an artist and my dads a scenic designer, so art was always a big part of my life. My mom even had a pottery wheel in the garage. So id say from the time I could hold a pencil I was drawing. I think I gravitated towards art because I was decent at drawings and as someone who is horrible at math and so unbelievably unathletic, it felt good to be good at something.
I didn’t take art seriously until high school when my mom actually pushed me to take an art class. I had really bad health issues as a teenager and struggled with anxiety, and I think her motherly instincts were right, that I needed to focus on the thing that came naturally to me. I never really looked back. I went to a summer intensive where I spent all day in the studio with college professors and around other really talented high schoolers who challenged me and showed me what it could look like to study art seriously.
That was when I decided I wanted to be an artist because for the first time I understood what an art career meant. I was really lucky to come from a family of creatives because I never had to question if art was a legitimate career path. I saw artists with really stable, happy lives everyday.
Your work looks at girlhood in the American South through performance. When did you first become aware that femininity could feel like something staged?
Catie: That is such a good question that I think I’m always trying to find the answer to. When I look back at my childhood in Georgia it all feels performed. There’s the literal performances of cotillion, beauty pageants, and debutante balls, but there’s also subtle performances, like going to a church service and watching the preacher wearing a costume and playing a character for a captive audience. As a little girl I was often in my own head—I felt like I was an audience member more than anything.
I was super interested in performance because I come from a theatre family, so I acted in plays and even did a pageant. What’s interesting to me now is how similar playing a character on stage felt to my regular life. The feeling of anxiety under the stage lights, looking out into the audience felt the same if not more comfortable than going to a school dance or interacting with older men on the golf course. When I think of girlhood, and that transition from childhood to being a woman, there was always a feeling that what I believed to be true and what I felt, were somehow at odds with one another.
It wasn’t until college when I learned about the double bind and irreconcilable nature of femininity that I understood so much of what I thought was normal was performance of my gender. Reading Judith Butler’s gender trouble was a real turning point for me. I’m so thankful to my wonderful professor and artist Heather Bennett for giving me a much needed crash course in feminist theory. She gave me the framework to put to words what I’d been feeling most of my life.
You use the Dalmatian as a proxy for yourself. What was it about that specific dog that resonates so well with you?
Catie: I’ve been kind of obsessed with them since I was a little kid. This is so embarrassing but I remember being 8 years old and reading a book on dalmatians and lying to everyone that I had one. My family friends owned two named dottie and mona. We were supposed to stay away from them because they didn’t like kids, but I remember always seeing them running in the woods on their property. I think sometimes in painting you have to trust your own compulsions. I just couldn’t stop painting them even though I didn’t know why yet or what they would come to mean to me. I sort of just painted myself into a meaning. Over time they got more anthropomorphized and I started making connections.
After the rerelease of Walt Disney’s 101 Dalmatians in the 1980’s there was a huge market for them and the industry responded with unsafe breeding practices that led to decades long health problems for the breed. That idea of prioritizing aesthetics at the expense of health and happiness resonated with me. I felt it held a mirror up to our culture’s commodification of women. The lengths to which we are willing to go for beauty. And for me, as a woman with a disability, I was really aware of how it felt to exist in a body that was praised for its beauty despite being invisibly damaged.
Dalmatians are visually striking, disciplined, elegant, but also slightly wild. Do you see that contradiction in yourself?
Catie: I do. It takes me back to that little girl who was obsessed with sequined ballgowns and painting my nails but never brushed my hair and had serious anger issues. I like how volatile Dalmatians can feel. They are beautiful and soft but they aren’t just cute, there’s the potential for aggression. In some ways I think my personality is loud and argumentative as a counter to the assumption that I’m just cute.
Your paintings connect show dogs and Southern women through ideas of beauty, obedience, and display. Did that parallel come from memory, observation, or something more instinctive?
Catie: I think its kind of all of the above. I was definitely drawn to them through instinct and this sense that they would somehow understand me more than other people would. I just knew that a maltese strutting around on the blue carpet of a show room underwood how it feels to be a girl raised in the south. But research really helped me connect this feeling to something real. I read Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd’s, Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South and realized that the words used to describe southern coming of age rituals like cotillion and Sorority rush were eerily similar to those used to describe an ideal show dog—things like coming from good breeding, nice grooming, and positive disposition. It was disturbing but it just clicked for me.
Growing up in Georgia, were you conscious of beauty rituals, church culture, debutante culture, or pageantry as forms of performance?
Catie: They were such a normal part of the culture that I never considered that they were performing for any other audience than the one seated in the theatre watching. But looking back now it feels sort of meta that we were performing for the real audience but the kind of cultural audience of the patriarchy as well.
Your statement mentions agency and submission. How do those two forces coexist in your paintings?
Catie: I love this question so much. I intentionally set my dalmatians up as flawed heroines. They haven’t decided quite yet whether they want to be performing. I think that’s important for me because of that idea of the double bind, where it becomes really hard to distinguish whether, as women, the choices we are making are for ourselves or because we have been indoctrinated to make them.
I’m interested in disrupting the predator and prey relationship between my hunting dogs, birds of prey, and female figures, constantly changing who is the perpetrator and who is the victim. In one painting the dog jumps off the stage as if to say she’s done performing but in another she is dutifully returning the dead bird to the hunter. I think that existing in a heavily gendered world we make choices everyday whether to be submissive or growl.
There’s something eerie in the theatricality of your work. Are you interested in beauty becoming unsettling?
Catie: I’ve always loved the uncanny in art and filmmaking. Im a big fan of David Lynch and the way he turns picturesque suburbia into a nightmare or strange matt paining and scenery from 1950’s and 60’s hollywood films. I’ve always loved Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint climb up a fake version of Mount Rushmore. It’s so absurd and fake looking but so captivating, which is what I love about film and theatre sets. There’s something very metaphorical to me about the idea of trying to imitate reality and falling short, and I think that’s where beauty becomes unsettling.
Your father was a scenic designer. How did growing up around constructed scenes shape the way you think about reality?
Catie: Growing up watching life theatre undoubtedly shaped my imagination. There’s a lot of mystery in the theatre. There were always places to hide and secret passageways. I remember being obsessed with the catwalk, orchestra pit, and costume storage rooms. I’m biased, but my dads sets were beautiful and immersed the viewer in the story in a way that would make even a too-cool-for-school teenager suspend their disbelief. The best part was that sometimes we would get to walk around the sets when there wasn’t a show. Something about seeing that the world still existed when the lights were off and the audience was empty felt like magic.
Do you remember the first time a stage, set, curtain, or artificial light felt magical or strange to you?
Catie: The first show I remember seeing was called Snow Dragon. The set was made of carved foam imitating ice and snow. The artificial snow dropping from the catwalk was the most magical thing id ever seen.
When your Dalmatians snarl, pose, or leap, they seem caught between control and rebellion. Are they performing for us, resisting us, or both?
Catie: I think it’s a bit of both. I can imagine the paintings as a sequential narrative in some ways, retroactively organizing the paintings from obedience to defiance. But I like the ambiguity. I’m also interested in depicting the moments when the dogs become conscious of their performance.
Do you think Southern girlhood teaches women to become good performers?
Catie: Good in the sense that they are really committed to the character, not that it’s a very interesting performance haha. But yes, it’s definitely one of many cultures that necessitates you become good at performing.
Was there a moment in your own life when you felt you were expected to perform perfection?
Catie: I think as a teenage girl there’s no winning. No matter how perfect you try to be, someone will always find a flaw. The older I get the more I’ve realized how silly it all is.
With that In mind. Your paintings deal with beauty, but not in a passive way. What does beauty cost in your work?
Catie: Beauty is a powerful tool that can act as a trojan horse. Particularly in painting or image making, beauty has a unique ability to captivate the viewers’ attention and consideration—a currency of great value in our contemporary life. But I think as the painter I also have to answer to my use of idealized imagery that may be complicit in the ideas I’m hoping to critique. So for me maybe that’s the cost.
Are your dogs ever angry on your behalf?
Catie: Oh yes! I made a series called “you should smile more” as a direct address. A dog’s snarl and “smile” look the same, so I thought how awesome would it be to growl at cat callers.
There’s a tension between sweetness and aggression in your imagery. Is that tension something you associate with femininity?
Catie: I really love Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, and Interesting by Sianne Ngai. She talks about cuteness as deeply associated with the feminine and infantile, directly related to powerlessness, and in need of reclaiming as an aesthetic. I find it important in my work to push back against the accepted assumption that cute art is incapable of complexity or criticism. I think the balance of aggression and sweetness in my work is a combative maneuver responding to assumptions of femininity. I hope to remind the viewer that even those perceived as “cute” should not be underestimated.
How has your relationship to girlhood changed as you’ve begun painting it from an adult perspective?
Catie: Things are starting to feel less dramatic now. Which is a good thing in my personal life, but not sure if it will make for good paintings. I recently turned 25, and what they say about literally feeling your brain grow is so true. I am able to look back more objectively and it’s less painful.
Are the Dalmatians characters, alter egos, symbols, or companions?
Catie: Can I say all three? They are me but they are also my pets.
What are you trying to understand about yourself through these staged, uncanny worlds?
Catie: Like a lot of artists, painting is how I process my life. I don’t know if I could pinpoint exactly what they’re saying because they communicate the feelings I can’t really put into words. When I’m ideating I’m thinking about gender performance, the male gaze, self-surveillance, expectation, and trickery.
Can you walk me through your creative process from beginning to end result?
Catie: My paintings usually start one of two ways: I either have a really clear image in my mind, or I think of an idea I want to communicate and sketch until the image comes to me. My ideas come from all over, an image on instagram, a line in a song, a scene in a movie, a memory, or something I see on the street. My first sketch is usually so provisional only I can really interpret it, then I like to flesh out the idea with a more realized sketch. I often have to spend a while finding or taking photo references for the scene. One painting probably has 10 fragments of image references embedded in it, like a Dalmatian with the head of one dog, body of another, and paws of a third. I used to make more studies so when I worked at scale I could just execute, but now I find that the uncertainty yields better results. Allowing the painting to continually reinvent itself—moving subjects, altering compositions, and changing colors—it retains in the final image a history of the work itself. I work in layers, often jumping between paintings.
Can you also tell me about your use of symbolism?
Catie: Right now I’m focused on the symbolism of the hunt. In my current body of work I’ve made it deliberately ambitious who is the hunter and who is the prey. In some images the female figures seem in control of the dogs, while in others, they are positioned as prey with the dogs as the aggressors. My first solo show, For Sport, opens this month. The title references hunting for sport, but I’ve also been thinking about the idea of doing something purely for pleasure or amusement as it pertains to southern culture and treatment of women and girls.
How do you approach color?
Catie: It’s not super intentional, but I always find myself working in a limited color palette. I have a few combinations I always come back to, like making black with Phalo Green and Quinacridone Magenta. Lately I’ve been really into landscape paintings with artificially bright blues and greens. In general my color schemes are inspired by the artificial colored light and scenery of the theatre. I am also influenced by technicolor in old movies. I want my paintings to teeter on a line between naturalism and artificiality.
So with what we just talked about, what are you hoping to convey?
Catie: Dramatized lighting and unnatural color may contribute to the understanding that my scenes are artificially performed. I also think about bright colors as a tonal contrast to the subject matter, like a bright pink bow tied to a dead bird. There’s sometimes unexpected and unsettling about such a happy, pretty violence.
Ok Catie, now to something totally different. In a parallel universe who would you be? and what would you be doing?
Catie: I’d love to be a park ranger. I think the only thing that competes with painting is spending time outside. Maybe in another life I’m a quiet, older man with a mustache who runs one of the national parks out west.
Outside of art, what’s something you’re obsessed with right now, maybe a hobby, a show, or even a food—that keeps you grounded or inspired?
Catie: Taking a walk is the best reset in the world for me. I take a walk every day if I can, the longer the better. It just instantly boosts my mood. Bonus points if I can convince someone to go with me.
Can you tell me a story about a time when a connection with someone had a big impact on you?
Catie: Someone messaged me on instagram once to tell me that my work helped her through her divorce. That meant a lot to me.
What qualities do you find most important in the people you choose to spend time with?
Catie: I think it’s important to be able to choose happiness even when things are tough. It’s something I struggle with, but I find I’m really drawn to people who are glass half full types.
Anybody you look up to?
Catie: My mom. She has a selflessness and love for the people around her that always inspires me. I also really look up to my mentor Jamie Adams. He’s an exceptional painter and person. He has a career in academics and in the art world that I aspire to.
What motivates you?
Catie: I think it’s equal parts love of the game and the unfortunate fear of failure.
How would you describe a perfect day?
Catie: I’d probably naturally wake up early feeling super rested (this is rare for me). It’s so basic, I know, but I’ve been loving a pilates class to get my day started. I’d paint for a few hours until I magically have a breakthrough in a painting I’ve been struggling with, then take a walk. I’d end the day with dinner and drinks with my boyfriend and friends.
Alright Catie, I always ask these two questions at the end of an interview. The first is. What’s your favorite movie(s) and why?
Catie: I’ve never seen an old hollywood movie I haven’t loved, so it’s hard for me to pick one favorite. But if I had to pick one it’s probably Singing in the Rain.
The second is. What song(s) are you currently listening to the most right now?
Catie: I’ve been listening to The Fairest of The Seasons by Nico quite a bit recently.