Childlike wonder

Catia Chien captures melancholy and mystery in her paintings

By Jonathan Shipley
Published: August 8th, 2008 | 3:55pm

Though her art looks like child’s play, it most certainly is not. Catia Chien, a Southern Californian by way of São Paolo, Brazil, has been at it for years, creating images that are both charming and melancholic, both enclosed little dreamlands and wide open imaginariums.

“Most of my ideas come from dreams I’ve had and doodles reflecting random musings. I take these bottled-up ideas and expand on them, sometimes filling pages.” These pages turn into paintings. These paintings have graced big city gallery walls and small picture books. She’s worked with Automatic Pictures and Nickelodeon. She illustrated the children’s book The Sea Serpent and Me, which Houghton Mifflin Company recently published, and another, To Catch a Mermaid, was published by Little, Brown and Company in 2007.

And more books are coming. “Last year, after meeting with a publisher in New York, I was offered an opencontract to write and illustrate my own picture book,” she says. “I feel truly fortunate.” Her fortunes are indeed rising with her freelance work and creation of stories for the Flight and Belle and Sebastian anthologies. Fortunate, and busy.

“It might be simplistic,” Chien notes about how she got into art in the first place, “but it was just the freedom to be completely myself.” Filmmakers and artists such as Jean-Pierre Jeunet, John Singer Sargent, Julie Taymor, Marjane Satrapi, and Michel Gondry have inspired her. Other than loving film, she also finds inspiration in many other areas. “Art that is honest, traveling and finding home in unexpected places, inventions, books, good food, intricate gardens,” she says. “There are many, many more things that inspire me.”

Has being a woman shaped her art at all? “Good art can transcend gender and race. I feel whether you are a male artist or a female artist, you are granted the same freedom of expression.”

Now, with her own studio, (she had previously worked out of a tiny bedroom), she’s eager to do even more. “Setting up a separate studio space for all my art projects is really exciting for me,” she says.

And those who see her art are just as excited. One piece shows a young girl being carried away into the great beyond by kites. She doesn’t look particularly upset. Another depicts a scarf-wearer trundling across a barren train platform to an awaiting train car, destination unknown. In another, a frightened tot peers out from under a flower in a field of them. Why so afraid? What’s the rest of the story? And this is the power of Chien’s work —they tell a story, but there are necessary parts to the story missing that she allows viewers to create on their own. “We are all part of the human experience, and that’s the whole point,” she says.

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Learn more about Catia Chien and her work at catiachen.com.