About Cate

Cate M. Leach is an award-winning artist whose style is distinguished by a love of line, a sensitive appreciation for composition and the awareness that resolution often comes by eliminating the nonessential. Having spent many years as a dancer with George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet, Leach finds inspiration and meaning in subtle gestures and an economy of form.

Leach’s paintings, prints and assemblages have been exhibited at museums and galleries throughout New York and Connecticut, including Lyman Allyn Art Museum, Housatonic Museum, Sacred Heart University in CT, and in NY at LaGuardia Airport and the Prince Street Gallery. She is a member of the Silvermine Guild of Artists (New Canaan, CT), the Loft Artists Association (Stamford, CT), Art/Place (Fairfield, CT), the Center for Contemporary Printmaking (Norwalk, CT) and Connecticut Women Artists. Her work is currently shown with RE at Nest Inspired Home in Rye, NY

Artist Statement

“I was part of the highly charged atmosphere of dancers, choreographers, costume designers and musicians all working in concert, (usually), toward the common goal of creating art.

The order and beauty of dance came with a constant struggle to master technique and achieve fluidity and grace of movement. It is the same now in my paintings; I work hard to arrive at a place where there is balance and energy.

This relationship between music, color and mood is a basic theme for me. Many of my paintings express my visual interpretation of the emotion of music and my memory of being within the music when I was dancing. Sound is transformed into fields of saturated color and expressive markings suggesting the continuum of a musical phrase. A rhythm is created, a mood expressed.

I am attuned to nature, to its depths, colors and moods. By means of multiple layers of glazing, color and mood analogies, geometry, and gestural lines, I attempt to find parallels to my reveries and experience of being in nature. The shapes, lines and patterns come from my sense of kinetic energy. One stroke suggests another. I merely paint what the last stroke evokes.  These marks have sometimes been interpreted as dancers or figures in motion. I see them as pure energy.