Ashley Bergeron Segroves
With ferocious determination, Catron Wallace pounces on a canvas. Timidity doesn’t enter her thinking. Her body’s movement is revealed in lines that rise like airy ribbons above layers of acrylic paint. This self-taught painter imbues her art with the physicality and passion of Abstract Expressionism.
“I do paint with my whole body at times,” Wallace says, reviving memories of the “action painting” techniquemade modern by Jackson Pollock in 1947 with his first “drip paintings.”
Like Pollock, Wallace goes from macro—creating lines that suggest movement beyond the canvas—to micro, as she scrapes away paint layers to reveal underlying color.
The paintings match Wallace’s spitfire personality. On meeting her, a petite blonde carrying a dainty dog under her arm, one is charmed by the pure music of her lilting Mississippi accent. But Wallace doesn’t drawl; there’s no time for that. She speaks quickly, as though underscoring that she’s a lady on a mission, one that began three years ago when she left her native state with her horse, paintbrushes, and a midlife dream, after two divorces and the death of a child, to become a Nashville artist.
“I put my horse in a trailer, I moved here, and I didn’t know a soul,” Wallace says, explaining how she abandoned a life of relative luxury on Mississippi’s Ross Barnett Reservoir to live in an old Tennessee church. “It had no air conditioning and no heat. I went from living the high life to that. I needed the change. I was ready and I knew I was going to make it.”
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The sensation one gets when talking with Wallace is that she has worked, with unremitting focus, for 30 years of what she calls “trial and error” and she isn’t about to quit. She is now the top-selling artist at The Studio 208, a hip downtown gallery owned by Ashley Bergeron Segroves.
“Catron is joyful and positive and lives to paint,” Segroves says. “Her energy is translated through color and strokes, with her surroundings and experiences coming through her to the canvas. Our clients fall in love with her work over and over.”
Wallace attributes her grit to her parents, horse lovers who often used a familiar equine metaphor to encourage her: “Get back in the saddle and ride on!”
Mirroring Wallace’s personality, her paintings are never heavy, but they are complex. Above all, they possess a distinct ferocity, reminding one of a different idiom: a Shakespeare quote often found on t-shirts, coffee mugs, and Instagram memes.
“Though she be but little, she is fierce.”