About
Cat Hartman is a 32-year-old South African expatriate and new mother residing in Västerås, Sweden, where she has been living for the past two years. With over a decade of experience in design, she has cultivated a diverse skill set that extends to digital art and encompasses a wide range of other artistic disciplines. As a self-taught multidisciplinary artist, she passionately explores various forms of creative expression.
In addition to her personal artistic pursuits, she actively contributes to her local community by hosting engaging art workshops that allow others to explore their own creativity. Her evenings are often spent immersed in her painting, where she finds inspiration late into the night. When she is not dedicated to her art or caring for her baby, she enjoys immersing herself in books and spending quality time with friends, balancing her artistic ambitions with the joys of motherhood and social connection.
Setting
Inspiration
Cat Hartman draws inspiration from nature, animals, emotion, and the beauty of everyday life. Her work moves between bright, bold colours and calm, serene palettes, reflecting the mood and intention behind each piece. Favouring impressionistic techniques, she works primarily with oil pastels and paint to create art that feels expressive yet intimate. Cat’s focus is on creating pieces that invite connection—art that brings a sense of warmth, authenticity, and wonder to the spaces it inhabits.
Cat Hartman is a self-taught artist who has sold and created commissioned works for clients over the years. She is committed to continually learning, refining, and expanding her craft, approaching each new project as an opportunity for growth and exploration.
She is currently working on a series exploring poisonous deadly flowers and the innocence and purity in animals.
She summarise's her technique as contemporary impressionism. Using paint, and oil pastels to create texture and blends.
She starts her creative process by gathering her ideas, exploring them through reference research, and developing quick exploratory sketches. At times, an artwork arrives in a sudden flash of clarity; other times, it emerges slowly through tests, experiments in her journal, and additional study.
When she’s ready to begin the final piece, she assembles a moodboard or composite reference and uses that—along with her earlier sketches—as guidance. She drafts the composition onto taped cold-pressed 300gsm paper, lays down an underpainting with acrylic and oil sticks, and allows it to dry. From there, she builds depth, texture, and colour with oil pastels, working with her fingers, blending tools, and tissues until the artwork reaches a sense of completion. Throughout the process, she continually refines the colour harmony, composition, and proportions to maintain balance.
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