Kate Loveday

Based in Stroud, Kate Loveday became a professional artist in her mid-40s, a fact she blames on an overly academic education.   After completing evening classes in drawing and textiles, she eventually went on to study painting at Bristol and then Cheltenham.  Now, her delightful still lives with their strong sense of colour and abstract quality are increasingly sought after. 

Her fascination with colour and design began early.  Growing up surrounded by ‘post war design’ Kate traces her love of colour to her ‘hip young parents’ who had no money and very little furniture but had early Conran wallpaper in the kitchen and painted the doors tangerine.  Her subsequent travels to North Africa and India exposed her to a world of pattern, hot colour, ancient surfaces and the contrast between dazzling sunlight and refreshing shade.

Now her bold and colourful compositions are the result of hours of absorbed observations, drawings and sketches of objects and plants in her beautiful home.  Unashamedly decorative, they have often been described as joyful and celebratory, calming and meditative.  Employing an intense but subtle colour palette, she applies oils with a light touch in several layers to create depth and shadow.  At first glance the compositions may appear simplistic but on closer inspection there is fine detail and texture.

Her paintings are intentionally painted on a modest scale to enhance private domestic spaces.  She says of her work “Enjoyment is taking a very ‘simple’ subject and giving it power and magic – no showing its power and magic!”


Articles
Country Living, Lifestyle Magazine of the Year, June 2007,  ‘A Painter’s Palette’
pp 126-133
Stroud News & Journal, 7 June 2006, ‘Artist celebrates simple beauty’,