Kate Bell

"Falling Through Darkness". Contemporary Abstract Oil Painting

2022

Her creative practice stems from a fascination for the spiritual connection between land, sea and sky, nature and mythology. The fragile boundary separating figuration and abstraction underlies her work. Her paintings are an emotional encounter, an embodiment of a sense of place through a continual dialogue between real and imagined geographies, both physical and psychological. Anomalies in land and seascapes harbour portals into other worlds through cracks, crevices, fissures, alignment of stones, sea caves, and the shoreline – thin places. A close relationship with the Gower coast has provoked an on-going series of work, most recently paintings have been inspired by the poetry of Vernon Watkins, the Welsh metaphysical poet who also lived on the coast of Gower. The concept of space, both actual and pictorial, implications of time and space, movement through shifting tidelines, weather and light materialise in these paintings. Watkin’s work responds to our coastal landscape, through experience, myth and legend. Kate is fascinated by combining these two art forms, responding to his poetry through line, colour, texture and shape. Kate knows the landscape of Gower well, having lived there most of her life and this helps her to work through sketches and paintings both in the environment but also through memory and imagination back in the studio. Kate is a professional Artist, Lecturer and Creative Agent for Arts Council of Wales. Primarily a painter, she has also worked in ice and glass. For the past 30 years she has taught Art and Design in Secondary, Further and Higher education. She has an MA in Fine Art: Contemporary Dialogues from Swansea College of Art, UWTSD. She has had several solo and group exhibitions in Wales and London and has works in private collections in the UK and Australia. She was awarded First prize at Queen Street Gallery Open 2019 and in February 2020 had a successful solo show at the Gallery, entitled ‘The Listening Sea’