KITTY REFORD

North House Gallery is delighted to be giving over the whole gallery to the paintings, drawings and prints of Kitty Reford, an ex-London artist, who for some years has been living and working quietly here in Manningtree. It has been a privilege to get to know her and discover her work of vibrant colour, wit and sensitivity.

The title of the show refers specifically to an event when her previous house in London was being rebuilt after a fire and there was a question about whether the upstairs rooms ever had coving. She simply couldn’t remember. Then she remembered that she had made a painting, White Studio (above), and there was the evidence of the coving.

'There are different things at different times that are important to me about a painting, but it is always more than a representation of a thing. Peculiarly, I sometimes think, it usually is about a thing. Why aren't I an abstract painter? I can't answer that question without too many words. I can say though that there's a narrow space, a cusp, between figuration and abstraction which I like to inhabit. I feel at home there. I like ambiguity. What's important to me about a figurative painting isn't ever that it should be a perfect representation of its subject. If it were that, what would be wrong with a photograph, or the thing itself? Paint is stuff and you paint on a surface that can be of many sorts. I like painting that contains evidence of this process, leaving it accessible and allowing space for a delve into its making.

'Painting and maybe more especially drawing (because it is often quicker, and in a particular location) has a diaristic quality, unsummoned by you it is just there. You remember so much of the occasion of drawing or making that is irrelevant to the process, the intention or the result. I don't know if it matters that this is invisible and unimportant to a viewer of the work.' KR

Kitty Reford has a degree in Fine Art from Canterbury College of Art, an MA in painting from the Royal Academy Schools and an MA in printmaking from Camberwell College of Art. She has, in the past and recently, regularly shown in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair and The Discerning Eye, as well as being included regularly in the International Open Print Exhibition at Bankside Gallery and various 'Masters' exhibitions including The Masters: Etching, and The Masters: Screen and Stone. She regularly shows at Bankside Gallery with the LOOP collective of Printmakers. Other recent shows include Down the Line at the Anna Lovely Gallery, London, Animal, Vegetable & Mineral at The Art Station, Saxmundham and Common or Garden at The Jugg Art Foundation, Ipswich. She has taught for many years in Further and Higher Education, including most recently at Colchester School of Art.

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