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. Kate has enjoyed much success with her paintings in recent years. Taking inspiration from her beautiful garden and home she makes sketches of plants, flowers, fruit and ceramics before developing them in oil. Her paintings celebrate the simple pleasures in life; the seasons, a ripe fig, a glimpse of the sea, a seed head or her favourite jug. Her use of colour; apple greens and yellows for example gives her paintings a “vintage” feel but in a cleaner, more uncluttered way.

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.

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’