A Return to the Canvas for Caitlin Leline-Hatch

Caitlin Hatch. Photo courtesy of Caitlin Hatch.

Caitlin Leline-Hatch’s Door County roots emerge through watercolors

Caitlin Leline-Hatch grew up surrounded by horses. 

“We didn’t have the tablets and the screens to distract us, so I just spent a lot of time in the barn, sitting on the hay bales next to the horses, sharing my popsicles with them,” Leline-Hatch said.

That barn was on a hobby horse farm just outside of Baileys Harbor. Now, Leline-Hatch lives on a dairy farm in southwest Wisconsin — but her Door County roots have a way of coming out in her watercolor paintings.

Years after moving away from her childhood home, horses remain the focus of her artwork – including her painting “Waiting Patiently.” In October, that painting won first place at the Northwest Watercolor Society’s 82nd International Open Exhibition out of 664 watermedia paintings. 

Another horse painting of Leline-Hatch’s, titled “Looking Back,” is featured in the American Impressionist Society online exhibition.

“I’ve only entered a couple of competitions before this,” Leline-Hatch said. “The first two, I got turned down. Then I started getting into all of them that I’ve applied for, and it’s just been a whirlwind.” 

This critical recognition only came to Leline-Hatch after she took a ten-year painting hiatus. When she had kids, she realized she wouldn’t be able to make time for her art.

“With watercolor, you kind of need a chunk of time,” Leline-Hatch said. “You can’t just stop in the moment and step away.”

So she took a break from painting – a painful decision to make.

“I felt a deep sadness that I didn’t have the time or space to have art in my life, but I kind of let it go and moved forward,” Leline-Hatch said. “Then I woke up in the middle of the pandemic and was like ‘I have to do this. If I wake up in another 10, 20 years and haven’t made a huge effort with my art, I’m going to be really disappointed.’”

When Leline-Hatch had this realization, getting back into painting wasn’t a struggle, but making time to work was. Her children were home from school due to Covid, and she didn’t have much room in her days to spend on painting. So she stayed up late at night, painting under a small lamp in the bedroom as her husband slept.

Now her children, aged nine and ten, are in school in-person again, so she has more time in the afternoons to paint.

Testing the Water(colors)

Before her painting hiatus, Leline-Hatch had spent the majority of her life making art. As a kid, she remembers winning small local art competitions; as a teenager, she mowed lawns for discounts off of classes at the Peninsula School of Art.

At that point, she was working mainly in oils and acrylics. It wasn’t until her junior year in high school, when Leline-Hatch spent a year abroad in Argentina, that she realized she needed to switch mediums.

“I took all my oil paints with me and I took an art class down there,” Leline-Hatch said. “It was such a pain to haul everything back and forth.”

After Leline-Hatch returned to the States, her grandmother bought her a watercolor set. Leline-Hatch quickly found that watercolors were much easier to transport than oil paints, so she started taking them with her everywhere.

She remembered one time when she and her now-husband were struggling to get the heat working on a cold winter day: “I was sitting there with my little sketchpad and watercolors, freezing but still painting,” she said.

In addition to being a more accessible medium than oil paints, watercolors forced Leline-Hatch to let go of some of her perfectionist tendencies. The subjects of her first few watercolor paintings were glass bottles, which she painted with intense precision, but over time, she started to appreciate the dynamic, moving nature of the medium.

“I definitely tried to stay tight for a while until I started throwing and splashing and spraying water around more,” Leline-Hatch said. “Then I started to loosen up.” 

Leline-Hatch and her husband visit Door County a few times a year. Leline-Hatch still refers to Door County as “home” when she and her husband plan their trips.

“I don’t consider myself truly having moved,” Leline-Hatch said. “I’m still there.”