After an absence from art making, being immersed in many other life obligations, filmmaker/photographer Catherine Bussiere admits she was wilting, maybe without even realizing it.
Being the creative person that she is, she knows how to channel the artistic urge into other areas. She just does it naturally. She loves to cook and pays attention to how it is presented. She enthusiastically takes part in the building of a small house her family has been hard at work constructing for the last two years. She takes pride in her many accomplishments, be it drywalling, hooking a rug, foraging for mushrooms or writing a travel blog. Her fine art sensibilities are tightly woven into her life no matter what she is working on.
She finds the idea of jumping back into a personally-driven art project after time has gone by daunting. We can all feel this way. Absence often breeds insecurities and self-doubt. Catherine certainly knows what she doesn’t want to tackle right now. She can rule some things out. From past experience, a major film project feels more suited to a collaboration as part of a team, involving many months of research, planning, filming and editing. A huge commitment of time and energy that does not feel right at this moment in time. Similarly she is reluctant to take on commercial contracts in which she does not have a vested interest to drive it forward. Having grown up in an artistic family, her father and brother both painters and her sister a graphic designer, she has always avoided painting.
Instead, Catherine is looking for something that will inspire and surprise her. That will fill her with joy. Tap into the playful person that she is. She has crows on her mind.
In 2017 Catherine took part in a group exhibition, A Murder of Crows, at the Fraser Gallery in Tatamagouche. For her contribution to the show she drew a humorous series of crows that sparked her imagination. Since then she has done a number of ‘daily crow’ drawings and posted them on Instagram under the title “thesquarecrow”. “I felt they were just me.”
Catherine would like to rekindle her love of drawing and explore writing further. She knows she will have to give herself a deadline, to make it part of her busy schedule. She dreams of creating a picture book starring these feathered characters that have continued to charm and delight her for the last six years. After that? Animating her squarecrows? Anything is possible when Catherine taps into her well of experience and creativity.
Her inspirations are the films of Woody Allen, Frederico Fellini, Milos Forman and Wes Anderson.
For more of her work: https://hookingrugs.wordpress.com/2014/09/14/catherine-bussiere-back/
