Chappel Galleries Fine Art Chappel Galleries
Email Us

KATHERINE HAMILTON
Journeys East to West

Private View Saturday 6th October 2007 noon - 5.00pm
Wine served - All Works for Sale
Exibition Finishes Sunday 28th October 2007

Click here for 2016 exhibition - Landscape Journeys Inside and Out 2013-2016


Where enquiries of prices are made on the gallery, the work is subject to availability and the price to change.


- please enquire for prices -
       

Market II, San Francisco El Alto, Guatemala
Oil
54 x 71cms

Sleeping Couple, Southwold
Oil
52 x 90cms

River Valley, Western Highlands, Guatemala
Oil
54 x 84cms

Bull Runners, ArIes, Southern France
Oil
94 x 114cms

Sacred Waters, Pushkar, Rajasthan
Oil
81 x 154cms

Western Highlands, Guatemala
Oil
74 x 74cms

Storm, Southwold
Oil
81 x 168cms

Marsh, Southwold
Oil
63 x 72cms

Camel Fair, Nagaur, Rajasthan
Oil
85 x 160cms

Summer 2006, Southwold
Oil
81 x 119cms

Market I, San Francisco El Alto, Guatemala
Oil
54 x 83cms

Bridge, Venice
Oil
61 x 103cms

Gateway, Baggar, Northern Rajasthan
Oil
58 x l04cms

Evening Falls, Southwold
Oil
91 x 138cms

Zunil Valley, Western Guatemala
Oil
82 x 90cms

Whitby Harbour
Oil
66 x 117cms

Street Baggar, Rajasthan
Oil
74 x 74cms

Morning, Baggar, Northern Rajasthan
Oil
48 x 89cms

Fisherman, Harbour Mouth, Southwold
Oil
122 x 106cms

Drawing Water, Aravelli Hills, Rajasthan
Oil
64 x 85cms

Small Holding, Guatemala
Oil
38 x 76cms

Solola Market, Guatemala
Oil
86 x 104cms

Boating Lake, Southwold
Oil
36 x 94cms

Piazza, Palermo, Sicily
59 x 92

Osiyan Women, Rajusthan
74 x 64cms

Allotment, Spanish Pyrenees
68 x 119cms

Watering Cattle, Aravelli Hills, Rajasthan
33 x 81cms

Razeteur, Arles, Southern France
37 x 92cms

Early Morning Market, San Francisco, El Alto, Guatemala
80 x 114cms

 

If a journey is a good metaphor for art and life, then Katherine Hamilton is an excellent example of a valiant explorer – always taking off in new directions and telling vivid traveller’s tales in panoramic pictures crackling with light, colour, absorbed activity and authentic local atmosphere.

Not for nothing is the word “travel” close to the word “travail”. Kate scorns the easy route. Her hard-won images are essentially experiments just as her life is a largely unplanned work in progress – an apparent meander off the beaten track in which movement is the main thing. The only trick is that the resulting paintings look so effortless and invite such a sense of calm.

Kate hails from a large and creative family, with a childhood sharply split between the freedom of Dartington School and a strict girls’ boarding school, but with the fixture of a clan base on the Sussex Downs in a house once occupied by Bertrand Russell. From the outset she was caught between the callings of art and dance. After a trial spell at the London School of Contemporary Dance, there were teenage studies in the Sussex studio and French summer school of painter Peter Norton, in Florence with Signorina Simi (Annigoni’s tutor), and at London’s Byam Shaw School of Art. Then, in a rare act of returning, she was back at the contemporary dance school, studying ballet, modern dance, choreography and music notation – before dancing in New York, running her own company in Amsterdam and training a troupe of street children in Addis Ababa.

After that it was art again – progressing from charcoal to pastel to oils applied first by hand and then with brushes – while living in central Italy, in the Drôme and French Pyrénées and on the island of Mallorca. And then, divorced and with two young sons, she moved through East Anglia to a billet in coastal Suffolk where her life and work finally came together. In a further sign of transformation the professional artist Katherine Gault had by now adopted her middle name as a working surname. Such has been the evolution of painter Katherine Hamilton.

In a garden shed – freezing in winter, frying in summer – she may work on 20 pictures concurrently, treading unfinished canvases underfoot as the journey continues. The precious is rejected at every point, but each work emerges very slowly and with infinite care. A long picture – recreating, in this show, a deeply felt impression of Guatemala, Rajasthan or Arles, as well as a peculiarly eerie Southwold – takes a long time.

Of all her teachers maybe she owes most to Bill Jacklin, whose Grand Central Station commuters resemble freezeframed dancers in the grandest dance hall. Kate’s lithe figures have a similar grace, perfectly poised and attuned to the music of time.

Ian Collins

*Ian Collins is an arts writer and curator whose books include Making Waves: Artists in Southwold. His next title – Bird on a Wire: The Life and Art of Guy Taplin (Studio Publications, £29.95) – is out in September.

KAHERINE HAMILTON

 
1971
Academy of Florence, Italy (studied painting and drawing)
1972
Byam Shaw School, London
1972-75
London School of Contemporary Dance
1976-80
Working in New York as dancer and choreographer
1982
Moved to Italy as full-time painter, also living in the Pyrenees, Provence France, Mallorca Spain
1992
Living and painting full-time in East Anglia

 

CURRENT WORK

 

2005
February to March – painting trip to Guatemala, travelling in the remote area of the Western Highlands
2006
February to March – Painting trip in Rajasthan, India; interest in village and rural life

 

PUBLICATIONS AND TV

 

2005

‘Making Waves’ by Ian Collins Anglia TV ‘Coastal Inspirations’

2006
‘Southwold, An Earthly Paradise’ by Geoffrey Munn

 

COMMISSIONS

 

1996-97
Private collections - eighteen commissioned portraits
2005
Southwold, Gunhill

 

EXHIBITIONS

 

1985
The Christopher Hull Gallery, London
1986
The Piccadilly Gallery, London
1991/93

The Sue Rankin Gallery, London

1994

Thackeray Gallery, London

1996
The New Academy Gallery, London
Chichester Cathedral, (highly commended award)
Exhibition organised by Christie’s London
1998

Cambridge Contemporary Art
‘Walberswick: Post War to Present’
Chappel Galleries, Essex
Chappel Galleries, Essex – Solo Show

1999
Woodgates Gallery, Suffolk
2000
Fry Gallery, Saffron Walden, Essex
2001

Chappel Galleries, Essex – Solo Show

2002

‘Blythe Spirit’ Chappel Galleries, Essex
Rougham Barn, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

2003

‘Painters and Sculptors of East Anglia’
Messums Gallery, London

2004
Chappel Galleries, Essex – Solo Show ‘Coastal Journeys’ with monograph
2007
‘Southwold, the East Coast’ Chappel Galleries, Essex
Chappel Galleries, Essex – Solo Show ‘Journeys East to West’ with monograph

 
 
 
 
 
 
Back
 
Website Copyright Chappel Galleries