July 3, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Horrific seizures since the age of 5
Painting is the salvation of brain cancer survivor
By JENNIFER ZARRO

Cathy Hozack, 28, is a talented Chestnut Hill watercolorist who had sucessful brain surgery (to make seizures stop) in April.

Cathy Hozack, 28, creates beautiful watercolor paintings. When I meet her, she’s standing at the kitchen counter of her mother’s home on Crefeld Street in Chestnut Hill, and she’s leafing through her small sketchbooks. On one page there’s a subtle painting of blue sky and water, with the shapes of the sailboats made by letting the white of the paper show through.

Another painting is abstract. It looks like a zigzag line running across a colorful background. In fact, the peaks and valleys of this line are just like the ones on Cathy’s recent EKG strip. It was the first painting she made after coming home to recover from brain surgery.

The small paintings in these sketchbooks are revealing because they form a picture of the artist, a sort of self-portrait. There are watery blues and greens in her sketches of Bermuda, a favorite family vacation spot. There are the tall buildings of Center City where she lived until early spring, when she had the first of two surgeries to fix a seizure disorder she’s had since she was five years old. On each page is evidence of her command of the medium. Her watercolor technique is layered. She uses a combination of light washes of color behind opaque shapes that can suggest buildings, windmills or the shaded arch of a bridge. 

In early spring Cathy underwent two surgeries in an attempt to stop her seizures. The first one installed implants in her brain in order to induce seizures. Having obtained the information about exactly where the seizures were coming from, doctors at Jefferson were able to take out the part of her brain causing the seizures. After waking up, Cathy didn’t speak for two days.  Since then, she’s been recovering at her mother’s house in Chestnut Hill, letting her brother use her Rittenhouse Square apartment while he prepares for medical school. 

Cathy paints every day. Her makeshift studio is set up at one end of the kitchen table. She also paints around Chestnut Hill, or in the backyard of her home which opens up directly onto Fairmount Park. She has a proper artist’s studio in Manayunk but hasn’t been there since the surgeries, preferring instead to walk around Chestnut Hill with her mother, eat lunch at McNally’s or paint in the kitchen. 

“Bermuda Night,” which reflects Cathy’s use of bright colors and large sizes (65” x 82”), was in a show in Aspen, Colorado.

She notes that painting has been her salvation since surgery; “It’s what keeps me sane,” she says. The experience of her surgery and recovery comes through in her work. Along with the EKG painting, Cathy made her mother a small, impressionistic painting of a leaf of parsley because parsley was a word she could not remember after surgery. Once she had regained the word, the painting became a symbol for the harrowing effects of surgery but also for her amazing recovery.

Cathy graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2006. “I haven’t been out of art school for that long,” she notes. But since school she’s traveled extensively and tried to get shows and gallery representation. Her paintings hung at McNally’s for about a year, and she’s been sending her slides to Old City galleries such as the Rosenfeld Gallery. 

At the beginning of June, Cathy held a one-night-only exhibition of her paintings at UMS Partners, a business in Old City run by Mark Turnbull, who is “a very generous person.” Turnbull and the Hozacks know each other from Musical Cocktails, a benefit group that raises money for the Philadelphia Orchestra. The exhibition was a sort of post-surgery coming-out party for Cathy and the 300 people she invited.  

The exhibition featured works of art made on her travels in Ireland, Italy and other paintings of Philadelphia. She also spent time painting in Spain while her sister was a student there. While in Tuscany, she traveled around by herself, engrossed in painting and not speaking to anyone for days. 

This solo trip was worrisome for her and her family because at the time she had unpredictable seizures, which would come on without warning. One of her triggers was overheating, so spending the days in the Tuscan sun was particularly dangerous.  But she got lucky on all of her trips, and was able to paint and travel without major incident. 

Much of Cathy’s young life was interrupted by seizures that she says made her feel self-conscious. She notes that she often found talking to people difficult because she would get halfway through a sentence and forget what she was going to say.  Luckily, her post-surgery life is filled with optimism. “I feel safer now,” she says. “Before, mom was worrying, and I was feeling awkward and unsafe, and I’m glad I don’t have to worry about that anymore, I feel I can go back into town and just be a young painter.” 

Cathy Hozack is beautiful and tall; she has honey-colored hair.  She says that during her walks around Chestnut Hill, “Everyone recognizes me because I look just like mom … I used to be shy (before the surgery), but I’m not shy anymore.” She’s now more outgoing and much louder. And in the future, when she’s off the last of the medications, she hopes to be “even more clear minded.” 

“A scary thought,” jokes her mother. 

These positive, post-surgery changes are mirrored in her artwork, too. She paints more often now and paints faster, with brighter colors. Even in the post-op period, her mother says that “she didn’t forget any of her training; even when she couldn’t remember people’s names, she could remember the names of all her colors.”

“They didn’t really teach watercolor at the Academy, but I stayed with it, no matter what.” Cathy is talking about her chosen genre, and the traditional curriculum of the Academy Certificate program which focuses on painting, sculpture and printmaking. She cites the painter Elizabeth Osborne as an important teacher for her. Even now, post-surgery, Osborne remains a close contact as Cathy tries to create the life of a professional artist. 

After going to Springside and graduating from Delaware Valley Friends School, Cathy worked at the Morris Arboretum. While working there, she also took art classes.  Eventually she realized that making art is what she wanted to do. “It took me a while to figure it out,” she explained. “I would always scribble on the walls as a child. I didn’t think I’d get into the Academy, but I did … It just takes a while to make money and to survive.”

In the meantime, Cathy works to get her skills back.  She can read now, something she couldn’t do prior to the surgery because it would give her headaches. “When I first got home, my writing was awful, but I picked out a book by Georgia O’Keeffe, my favorite artist, and I copied down everything she wrote. Her colors are very strong and bold, but every painting is feminine … Like her, I want to be away from the city and paint — so Chestnut Hill is the perfect place to be right now.”

Cathy’s paintings hang throughout the house. Some are very large — she says that 65 x 82 inches is her favorite canvas size — and all are filled with layered bright colors and abstracted shapes reminiscent of landscape motifs.  Hanging alongside Cathy’s work are paintings by her great-grandmother, Jesse Young Dupuis, who attended the Art Students League in New York City several generations ago.

For Cathy, all of her subtlety goes into her paintings, but she notes that “everyday life is not a subtle thing for me.”