From illustration to painting.

You've probably seen her colouring books in souvenir shops and stationery stores. Catherine Pavageau is known as Barbara Bell in the world of illustration. She has been illustrating for publishers and magazines in Lisbon for 30 years. She has worked for prestigious magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Vogue and Maire Claire, looking for a fresh take on their editorial lines. She has also produced a children's book for the newspaper Expresso, among others. Catherine works the old-fashioned way: all her illustrations are done by hand, with brushes and pencils. She is a true artist who thinks about her creations as a book illustrator, not as a graphic designer. Art is not her first artistic passion; she began playing the piano at an early age. She went to music school, because her father was a musician by trade and the piano always interested her. Then she took a break, and didn't touch the keyboard again for 20 years.

Later, when her daughter was a teenager, she took up the piano again with her daughter, and then naturally, under the advice of a Portuguese pianist who loved J.S. Bach, she started giving piano lessons to young people in Lisbon or other piano apprentices. Now, although she plays the piano every day with her pupils, she is more interested in painting. Painting is her passion, and she likes to reproduce her memories and landscapes. She likes to find photos of roads or rather isolated places on the net to paint them. Art lovers say that her paintings resemble Hopper or have a Hopper feel in the way she captures the moment and depicts a windy landscape. She confides that she likes to put vibrations into her work, and being compared to Edward Hopper is flattering for her, even though her favourite painter is Van Gogh. She is also very fond of Giacometti. She tried to capture his fragility in a sculpture of a raven that she made to decorate her flat. The raven is the symbol of the city of Lisbon, but she rarely paints animals, preferring landscapes and the parks of her city. In 30 years, she has seen Lisbon evolve, change a lot, she tells us. She finds her inspiration in nature, and likes to paint it as the seasons change. Recently, she came across David Hockney's latest works, and she feels the same sensitivity in depicting nature as it evolves over time. As for literature, she loves Flaubert, and her favourite novel is 'L'éducation sentimentale'. Like Flaubert, she loves telling stories and depicting nature. 

I hear the great tulip tree... quivering in the wind and, when I look up, I see the moon reflected in the river

Extract from a letter from Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet