The Artist’s Deception, the Artist’s Truth

Award-winning artist Irma Cavat paints what an admirer once characterized as “real paintings”.  They are as real as fruits and vegetables in a supermarket, cups and saucers on a table, round loaves of warm bread in a bakery, pounds of apples in shiny cellophane bags, bottles broken and unbroken against a wall.  She is out to turn the ordinary into magic and she consistently succeeds. At the base of her power is an ability to focus on colors, patterns and relationships in ways most of us do not.

Everything we see in our daily life tends to be distorted by fixed habits of looking.

In Paris, on the occasion of her first solo show, someone brought along Picasso. The meeting was unforgettable. Picasso’s enthusiastic reaction to the young American’s portrayal of his native Spain made “two dimensions the glowingest of goals”, Cavat recounts.  There’s more on this. Hint? He allegedly visited Irma in Santa Barbara.

Before Irma transcended into the afterlife in 2021, she told her youngest daughter Nika as a child holding her hand, “Painting is not a religious experience. Humanity to me is an overriding, exciting, unexpected experience. When people talk about a religious experience, I wonder what they mean. I know, for example, I have a touch of arthritis, I’m not as young as I used to be, but nothing hurts when I’m working. Is that a religious experience? I don’t know. It’s

purifying to a certain degree, and you see your mistakes.”

Irma also successfully held solo and group exhibitions from Santa Barbara, Montecito, San Francisco, New Mexico, NY, LA, to Italy, Greece, Haiti, Paris and England.

We are featuring approximately 80 of her stunning life’s work.