Catherine Conlin is a prolific artist, musician, poet, photographer and graphic designer. Her grandmother, Eva, recognized her talents early and when Catherine was two years old, had her Kimball Spinet delivered to granddaughter as a gift for her ability to play by ear. Catherine's parents followed up with piano lessons but it was not until her early 30's that Catherine re-discovered her artistic talents.

Having grown up in the rust-belt of the Midwest during a deep recession, the arts were never a scholastic priority. Private schooled, Catherine was encouraged to focus on the more strategic aspects of readying herself for college and the workplace instead of pursuing her dream of being a fashion designer. She studied business at Indiana University and graduated with a Marketing degree. Her electives were in art history, creative writing and ballet.

After graduation, she traded her stereo system for a photojournalist's Nikon F1 and a 50mm as well as a telephoto lens. She became enamored with the image, shooting faces, landscapes and quirky subject matter as a hobby.

At the age of 31, after giving up her fashion-merchandising career, she met Beat Painter, Wally Hedrick. For thirteen years, she was Hedrick's muse, his gallery liaison, his student, and his significant other. They shared adjacent studios where he painted and she honed her writing skills by taking classes and continued photography as a hobby. Wally encouraged her to be as free and fearless in all artistic pursuits and in doing so, taught her to paint and play guitar.

Conlin became serious about each of her artistic avenues and created a successful floral design business for fourteen years, by taking artistic control of her imagery. She built her own web site-one of the first of it's kind--and used her own photographs to build concise galleries that quickly became industry standard. Designers from across the country emulated Conlin's sense of clean imagery and simple design and became affiliates of her company, Wiggy Flowers in San Francisco.

Conlin's South of Market studio served dual purposes. During the day it was a floral studio and at night a music studio where her own band,Bedtime Story, rehearsed and recorded. Conlin was the band's impetus, the lead guitarist, writer and biographer.

In 2008, she sold her business and decided to dedicate herself to her art and her music. Her design studio became a full-time music/recording studio after pairing up with Konstantine Baranov in December that same year.

Conlin and Baranov produced over 35 songs together in three months and in December of 2009, released their collaborative cd, AWE. AWE is comprised of Conlin's spontaneous lyrics over Baranov's mellifluous guitar work. In May of 2011 they released their second cd together ,"Particles of Dust".

In her music, Conlin writes about her photography. In Shadow Tattoo, she proclaims,

Shadows are the inevitable part of light, or are they the absence of light? And is light, the absence of shadow, and shadow, the negative space of light.

In Thistle (un-released), she writes,

I'm like a whore with my camera, focused on the thistle on the mountain.

The opening line in Shadow Tattoo is,

The light through the trees, the light through the leaves, I focus my camera into the sun. They tell me not to do this.

Conlin describes her nature as feral and intrepid, and her photo work runs the gamut of subject matters from homelessness to broken glass to nature, architecture and collage. Her portraits are honest renderings of the people she portrays. She discovers rare pods and fronds and seeds as well as mutant flowers (as in her image of the double Echincea.)

Each gallery tells a distinct story not dependent upon set-up or pose. Like her lyrics, Conlin's photography is spontaneous and easy. She does virtually no cropping and uses whatever tool she has at the moment from camera phone to Nikon DSLRs to Leica point-and-shoot digital. She is a master of Photoshop and uses filters and grain to create mood, but little else remains changed.