Church's View/Hudson Valley from Olana Painting

When a very young Catherine Wagner Minnery’s family visited a hill top park in Cincinnati, Ohio, to see the flooded Ohio River, she remembers seeing a modest house, painted a pale turquoise blue, tilted off its foundation, surrounded by muddy water. “I was very young, it was in the 1950‘s, and I was amazed by all the water and the houses submerged! But that one block of blue surrounded by the creamy brown of the muddy Ohio River, is what really stuck in my mind. I could never think about that experience without recalling the blue of that unfortunate house. Maybe that was an early inkling of my life long pursuit of color”. At this time she and her siblings and parents lived next door to her maternal grandparents farm, just outside the Cincinnati city limits. It was an idyllic place and the colors, textures and smells associated with that place gave her an early appreciation of the natural beauty that surrounds us all. Sadly, the farm was sold after the death of her grandfather, but her family’s home was there and she remained physically connected to what was left of this special place until she was a young adult.  Her formal art education started at the University of Cincinnati where she was a design student with the vague idea of pursuing a degree in fashion design. Her first year drawing instructor convinced her that her talents lay more in the field of fine art. So in the middle of her second year of study, she left the university and started her studies at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. She graduated with a fine arts certificate and later finished her academic degree at the University of Cincinnati evening college. After graduation she obtained several positions in the field of advertising eventually working as an Art Director for a fashion shoe manufacturer. Along the way she married a fellow art student who had changed his major to architecture and when he graduated, they moved to South Dakota, where he started his career. Two more moves followed; to Mississippi and eventually upstate New York, where she freelanced as a graphic designer and illustrator while being a mother to three children. Knowing that eventually she would “get back into my own work”, it was her father’s illness and death, in 1986, that pushed her to find time to paint.