By Linda Roberts
Photos by Tiffany Dillon Keen
“I don’t remember not painting,” said Loudoun native Cathy Zimmerman, who makes her home with husband Tad at the couple’s charming Buttonwood Farm near the village of St. Louis.
The talented artist, whose work graces many homes in the Piedmont’s hunt country, doodled and sketched as a child, creating on paper the images that raced through her mind. Perhaps she was destined to be an artist because her uncle and great-uncle were also painters. She also recalled art teacher Emily Sharp at The Hill School in Middleburg encouraging her to keep at her craft.
After graduating from Garrison Forest School in Baltimore, Zimmerman entered the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., stopping to marry Tad in 1977.
“I got my ‘Mrs.’ instead of an arts degree,” she quipped.
Still, marriage and raising a family never stifled her desire to keep painting. There is always artwork in some stage of development on her easel.
Her favorite medium is watercolor and many of these eye-catching and beautifully framed works are on display at Middleburg’s Museum of Hounds and Hunting through Dec. 29, with 40 of Zimmerman’s watercolors.
She also ridden all her life and makes light of injuries sustained in the hunt field and while schooling young horses.
When she was laid up after one fall, her artistic life turned to oil painting to accommodate the necessary slowness in putting brush to canvas. For this energetic woman, who always keeps busy at one task or another, watercolors suit her style because they dry faster than oil painting.
Her subjects are the scenic landscapes, fields and woods that surround her life in the western Loudoun area. She doesn’t paint from photographs, but from memory. A friend once commented, “Cathy paints what you see from the back of a horse.” This elevated view affords Zimmerman a broader view of the area’s rolling terrain.
In addition to the landscapes, whimsy sometimes takes over her easel. Zimmerman creates colorful woodland creatures engaged in comical acts such as foxes pulling carts or turtles giving small animals a ride. From these scenes she produces notecards, once a popular item at The Fun Shop, no longer in business in Middleburg.
“Everyone thinks I have a studio,” she said, “but I paint in a corner of my kitchen.”
And, taking her uncle’s advice, she usually has a watercolor there in some state of completion. “It’s good to always have a painting started,” she added, the better to keep from being bored.
Her kitchen table doubles as a work space when it’s time to mat and frame one of her watercolors, and she does it all herself. Sometimes her artwork extends beyond the edges of the painting, spilling over onto the mat in pencil or watercolor, continuing the scene in a manner that the viewer wonders if Zimmerman was not quite finished with that particular piece of art.
Never one to sit still for long, Zimmerman delights in keeping her grandchildren, ages 6 and 8, after school and whenever “grandma is needed.” It greatly pleases her that granddaughter, Anna, also seems quite interested in art.
“I think she’s hooked,” Zimmerman said with a smile “And I always have art supplies here for them to use.”
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