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On Making Catcher

If fear obstructs true desire one accommodates it and becomes its willing companion. This is in payment for those moments of fearlessness, also called freedom. Catcher is a book created from my experience as an aerialist in the circus. It is a painted book with few words. For twenty years I have been a painter of large canvases and for some of those years I was a catcher in a double trapeze act. It was something I wanted more than my own physical safety. And I was afraid of it. Like my persona in the book I fiddled with my socks to avoid climbing to the high trapeze and I came to practice every day wanting to throw up. All this dissolves as one swings in the void created by a spotlight. The sensation of the bar under my knees and the double clasp that held my partner have never left my body.

To make Catcher I compressed and distilled what I know to tell a story that you can hold in your lap. Color is its heart, and brushwork its musculature. I used both illuminated silhouettes and realistic form in a setting that could be fully rendered or saturated with color in layers of glazing. This was to give it that sense of place that an aerialist experiences away from the ground and to leave the structure protean like film or theater.

I want the book for children because as a child I had these same fears and desires. And I want it for adults because we are no different. To acknowledge fear and let it run with you is to escape its stasis. To banish it is to enter the realm of levitation. It is for this that I climbed the ladder every day. Now I pick up the brush for the same reason.

-Mia Wolff