In 1949, after serving in World War II, he became qualified as an architect and created a series of Perspex and wood reliefs in 1949 - 50.
The result is a rhythmic and polychromatic ‘net-work of trails which loop, entwine and lose themselves in an indecipherable complexity’-(Review of Gimpel Fils exhibition, Manchester Guardian, 19-1-1953 ) These ‘Space/Time’ paintings may remind us of ‘electrons around a nucleus’ or ‘the trial of a jet plane‘,-(Colin St John Wilson, Notes on paintings by J D H Catleugh, January 1953 ) but they have no subjects as such.
Vertical black stripes were cut and pasted down, their orderly rows broken only by the addition of strips of coloured paper.
In 1959–62 his direction and style changed, using ‘oils and a knife’ his series of landscapes, moves closer to the lyrical abstractions of the painters of St Ives, such as Peter Lanyon.
Catleugh quotes; ‘As Lawrence Alloway said of St Ives‘, ‘the landscape is so nice that nobody can quite bring themselves to leave it out of their art’-(Lawrence Alloway, Nine Abstract Artists, Alec Tiranti Ltd 1954 ) 1984 - A series of Red/Black paintings started around the time of the 40th anniversary of the Normandy Landings, also many painful images were being shown on TV of the war in Bosnia and elsewhere, these led to the red/black figurative paintings which are often of just a single figure, sometimes reminiscent of a/the crucifixion which after all is the ultimate symbol of pain.
In 1988 - Reflections of the Fifties a two-man exhibition with John Milnes-Smith, whose career in the 1950s ran parallel with that of Catleugh's, although each had a different response to post-war directions in abstract art, this exhibition was focussing on two artists whose work reflects a post war world, and was like a time capsule opening to reveal directions in British abstract art of the nineteen fifties and early sixties.
Catleughs's overall career, was that predominately of an architect and who painted purely for the love, passion and the expression in which art can give and bring.