Photo by Imogen Forte
Cat Spilman never sets out with a plan when she walks into the studio. A canvas might begin with a crooked border or a missed patch of primer, but soon it takes on a life of its own, shaped by how she’s feeling in the moment. “It’s really not terribly cerebral, it’s all emotional,” she says. “I think of them as self portraits. Of course not figuratively, but in a very interpretative way they’re all snapshots of who I am in the moment and what I’m dealing with. I often think of them like when you have a dream and you’re not really analyzing it while you’re in it but when you wake up you start to connect the dots.”
Her paintings—stark black and white acrylics on canvas—are bold, raw, and full of energy. Solid shapes and overlapping lines replace figuration, while a deliberately limited palette shifts the focus to rhythm, movement, and composition. Restricting herself to just two colors gave her freedom: the freedom to build a new visual language that speaks directly from emotion rather than concept.
Spilman’s path to this work wasn’t straightforward. She trained at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, then spent nearly a decade painting sets for film and television in New York. Spilman turned to painting after a personal loss, and what began as a private cathartic practice gradually became her full-time artistic pursuit.
Now based in the UK and showing with galleries in London, Berlin, and Sydney, Spilman’s art has traveled further than she ever expected. What started as a deeply personal process has grown into a body of work that resonates worldwide: honest, vulnerable, and defiantly human.
