Catherine Senitt

Catherine Senitt (born 1945) is a Canadian painter and inventor of Wrinkles dogs. Her works are in the permanent collections of a number of major Canadian public galleries, though she has not publicly exhibited since 1979.

Life and work

Senitt grew up in Rochester, New York, and studied in the School of Art and Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her talents were recognized early through the receipt of the John A. Varney Award in 1964. In 1966, at the age of 21, she won Best Female Artist in the Finger Lakes Exhibit.

After her third year at the School of Art and Design, she immigrated to Canada in 1966. She settled in Toronto for the first 9 months and then moved to a school house near Fergus, Ontario.

During the late 1960s, she developed a successful painting career in Toronto using the name Cathy Senitt-Harbison. She showed her work at Pollock Gallery in 1967, where owner Jack Pollock also represented such artists as Ken Danby, David Hockney, and Willem de Kooning. She continued to be represented there through 1975 and the Merton Gallery from 1977 to 1978.

Senitt was awarded her first Canada Council Arts Grant in 1968.

Senitt's work was chosen to be part of the "Man and His World" exhibit in the grounds of the 1967 International and Universal Exposition (Expo 67) in Montreal. Senitt was selected to join Canada's pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan. featured an uncredited image of a paper mache sculpture Senitt had made of Pierre Trudeau in the form of a jack-in-the-box. A 1974 feature article in the Toronto Star painted a rich picture of Senitt's life at the time, showing the schoolhouse she lived in, as well as a photograph of her painting while sitting on the floor. A photograph of her painted bottles states that they sold for $30–50 at the Pollock gallery. and formed Senitt Puppets to manufacture them. They were licensed to Ganz Brothers, and in 1986 to Coleco for distribution in the US.

Her work is known for its creativity and sophisticated use of naive forms. Many of her works incorporate unusual human forms, and various series have focused variously on abstract portraiture, her pet Red Dog, and hybrid human-animal forms reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch or Gauguin. The Globe and Mail critic Kay Kritzwiser compared Senitt to "...Renaissance painters such as Grunewald (for whom she admits a worship) and Hieronymous Bosch (who impresses but does not inspire her.)" Senitt currently lives and works in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

Collections

Senitt's paintings are held in the following permanent collections:

Art Gallery of Ontario Art Gallery of Windsor Art Gallery of Hamilton University of Saskatchewan Queen's University Trent University Seneca College Canada Council Art Bank

Awards

John A. Varney Award, Brockport, 1964 Finger Lakes Exhibit, Best Female Artist, 1966 Canada Council Grant 1968 Childe Hassam Purchase Award, 1969 Aviva Hadassah, First Prize, 1971 and 1972 Canada Council Grant, 1974 Ontario Arts Council Grant, 1975 Ontario Arts Council Grant, 1979