!["Patrons]("/local/Z/ZWIRE1091/zwire/images/052402lavendercat.jpg")
Photo by Frank Wojciechowski
Patrons to The Lavender Cat can choose from hundreds of folk art projects like the whimsical place settings above.
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"LOOK
at this design," says Kathy Burnett, as she proudly motions to the hand-painted seat of a wooden stool in her
Hillsborough shop, The Lavender Cat. The design, which depicts the Barnegat Lighthouse, was created by Fran
Perlman, a Montgomery resident who started out as a beginning painter in one of The Lavender Cat’s workshops,
and ended up designing her own piece.
"What we do here," Ms. Burnett says, "is teach people how to paint it is what we absolutely
love to do."
Ms. Burnett says from the first time she picked up a brush she was thoroughly taken with
the art of decorative painting. She says teaching others how to find the courage to create has given her a
great deal of satisfaction.
"People often come in and say ‘I don’t have any talent, I can’t even draw a straight line,’
but after they’ve learned the process involved in decorative painting they are amazed at what they can create."
!["Kathy]("/local/Z/ZWIRE1091/zwire/images/052402lavender-kathy.jpg")
Photo by Frank Wojciechowski
Kathy Burnett shares her talent in the decorative arts with those who frequent her Belle Mead workshop.
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Decorative painting has evolved over the years. It began with the traditional or primitive
one-of-a-kind folk art that was unique to a particular piece of history or region. Folk art has broadened and
now includes a more sophisticated style of hand-painted art.
The idea for opening The Lavender Cat came to Ms. Burnett 10 years ago when she was working
full-time as a paralegal. She and her sister had driven to Chester, Pa., for a class, and it was then that
she says she fell in love with the process of decorative painting.
"I came home that night with a little chipwood box painted with a daisy and green flowers.
Before that night I had never held a paintbrush in my life." With nowhere in the area to go and paint, she
decided to rent a little room on the second floor of the Mountain View Plaza where she and her sister could
paint and be creative after work. That little room has expanded into several enormous rooms and is now a thriving
business with 18 teachers on staff and more than 500 regular students. Her mailings, which include information
on all of the workshops and seminars The Lavender Cat offers, go out to more than 3,400 individuals worldwide
including customers in Israel, Australia and Hawaii.
"You just grow from learning that you can do something like this," she says while motioning
to a Lazy Susan painted with a red Cardinal and red apples, an image designed by one of her most popular visiting
artists, Ros Stallcup. "It just makes you feel great."
"The trick," she continues "is that it is all done with patterns. There is a line drawing
or a pattern, and a sample of the item in the shop." The designer, like Ros Stallcup or Fran Perlman, creates
the artwork and provides a set of step by step instructions on how to duplicate it. There are hundreds of pattern
and design books as well as items for painting the images on available for purchase at The Lavender Cat. The
shop offers workshops on a regular basis in which students are taken through the process step-by-step. "We
teach you how to basecoat how to transfer the pattern, how to block in the color. We teach you how to shade,
how to highlight and how to stipple." The end result is something that is much more than a decorative accessory.
!["Plain]("/local/Z/ZWIRE1091/zwire/images/052402lavender-stools.jpg")
Photo by Frank Wojciechowski
Plain wood stools are transformed into objects of art at The Lavender Cat.
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Ms. Burnett says the process of learning how to achieve the ‘look’ is broken down into a
series of steps, each with a specific technique. Typically, after enrolling in a class, a student will stop
by the shop, pick up the wood for their project (she has two local woodcutters who cut most of her wood), and
follow the instructions on how to prepare it for class. The teacher walks the students through the project
in a classroom equipped with a video system that includes close-up cameras focused on the instructor’s hands.
This opportunity to observe and paint at the same time gives students a unique learning experience.
Ms. Burnett relates a story of a beginners’ class she recently taught where the group was
creating a serene painting of a pond surrounded by trees and flowers. "The sky was done and the soft-colored
background was done," she says, "and I had just started taking them through building the greens for the trees
and bushes when the group anxiously started saying ‘I don’t know where to put bushes and where to put trees.’"
Her response to them, she says to tell the "Let it develop. Wait and let me take you to the next step. Learn
to let your painting grow."
At that point, she says the class didn’t know that once they put one stroke of green paint
in, that it would start developing into a tree, and that the shading and highlighting would grow and develop
from that. With a laugh she says that she relates painting to raising children. "Your painting is going to
go through stages like your children go through. When you start out, you are excited to have this brand new
baby, he’s cuddly and he’s cute. Then they get to be a certain age and they start to lose their teeth, their
arms get long, their legs get long and they go through that gangly stage. But eventually you get to the adult
stage when everything pulls together. You are going to go through that gangly stage with your art to get to
the final product. I say let it happen, grow with it."
Seminars which feature a long roster of visiting artists attract customers who fly in or
drive from as far away as Ohio, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware and Maryland. The cost for a
class is around $15 for each three-hour class session, with most classes running for two-evenings, or $30,
plus materials. Seminars with a visiting artists such as Ros Stallcup, an artist from Virginia Beach who is
known for her soft freehand-type florals, are $50 per day and often run for several days.
More information about The Lavender Cat is available online at www.lavendercat.net or by calling the shop, located at 856 Route 206, at (908) 359-4490. Shop hours are Tuesday-Friday 10 a.m.-6 p.m., open until 9 p.m. on Thursdays. Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m. and Sunday noon-4 p.m. The Lavender Cat will host an Open House on Saturday, June 1, from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. and Sunday, June 2, from noon-4 p.m.
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