About
Cathleen Sullivan's Biography
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Cathleen Sullivan is a mixed media and ceramic artist, educator, and arts leader based in Port St. Lucie, Florida. Her work spans painting, printmaking, encaustics, and sculptural clay, resulting in richly layered compositions that emphasize rhythm, movement, surface, and luminous color. A former court reporter of 26 years, she returned to college later in life after immersive artistic study in Italy and throughout the United States, earning her Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Art, summa cum laude, from Empire State University.
In 2020, Cathleen relocated from Long Island, New York, to Florida to dedicate herself fully to her studio practice and arts education. She is the founder and owner of Treasure Coast Pottery, a thriving community studio offering ceramics, painting, printmaking, and mixed media programs for adults and youth. Her teaching philosophy emphasizes process-driven exploration, technical excellence, and creative confidence.
Cathleen serves as Secretary of the St. Lucie Cultural Alliance and Chair of the Public Art Advisory Board for the City of Port St. Lucie, where she actively advocates for public art, arts education, and cultural infrastructure throughout the region. Her work has been featured in galleries and exhibitions while mentoring artists at every stage of their creative paths.
Artist Statement
My work lives at the intersection of process, material, and intuition. I move fluidly between painting, printmaking, encaustics, mixed media, and sculptural clay, allowing each discipline to inform the next. I am deeply drawn to techniques that build in layers—visually, physically, and emotionally. Surface, rhythm, movement, and the interplay of opacity and transparency are central to how I construct each piece.
I am a self-described “technique junkie.” Learning fuels everything I do. Whether I am working with copper plates, wax, glazes, paper, or pigment, I immerse myself fully in each medium before carrying those discoveries forward into new work. My studio practice is experimental and intuitive, built through underpainting, repeated mark-making, pattern, print pulls, and additive and reductive processes. I rarely begin with a fixed outcome in mind—allowing the work to reveal itself through layering, revision, and risk.
Color has become my most powerful visual language. In recent years, my palette has grown increasingly bold and unapologetic. Joy, energy, rhythm, and celebration surface again and again in my work, often without conscious intention. What once lived in quieter tones now arrives with vibrancy, depth, and dimensional presence. My compositions aim to hold both structure and spontaneity at once—controlled chaos grounded by formal balance.
Clay remains foundational to my artistic identity. It was the medium that taught me form, patience, chemistry, and the beauty of transformation through fire. That understanding now flows directly into my two-dimensional work. I think about glazes and pigment in the same breath, about surface as landscape, and about the tension between control and surrender as essential to both.
At the heart of my practice is a belief that art is a lifelong conversation—between materials, between disciplines, and between people. Teaching has become inseparable from making. The studio is a place of exchange, where students bring fresh questions and I return again and again to the fundamentals with renewed curiosity. Community, mentorship, and shared creative momentum are not separate from my work—they are embedded within it.
Ultimately, my work is about connection: to process, to material, to joy, and to the collective energy that occurs when people make together. Every layered surface holds a history of decisions, revisions, and discoveries—quiet evidence of time, motion, and the freedom found through sustained exploration.