KATHERINE HAMILTON
Journeys East to West

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