Kate Corbett-Winder
COLOUR FIELD
LONG & RYLE 4 John Islip Street London SW1P 4PX t: +44 (0) 20 7834 1434 • e: gallery@long-and-ryle.com www.longandryle.com • tues – fri 10 – 5:30 sat 11– 2 Kate Corbett-Winder COLOUR FIELD 22 February – 4 April 2023
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Matisse Cloth, 2022
oil on board 51 × 38 cm
Kate Corbett-Winder
MATTHEW DENNISON
Biographer, historian and journalistIt is possible to be ravished by a painting – to be stopped in one’s tracks by the alchemy of oil and pastel and pencil, and compelled to drink thirstily. On a wintry afternoon, Kate Corbett-Winder lays out on a table three recent still-lifes: Paradise Poppies, August, Jubilee. In the act of looking, all the light in the room contracts on to this trio of images, planes of scintillating colour into which the artist has concentrated all the flaunting vigour of vanished high summer.
Kate’s painting is a celebratory act of remembering and recording. Her work captures fleeting visual impressionstessellations of lines and shapes, a swirl of colours, the interplay of light and shadow: the often jumbled kaleidoscopes of fragments and shards that one registers looking at a landscape, a garden or even a flower. Objects seen in daylight lack stability: their contours, colours and qualities shift with febrile light. Kate preserves their quiddity, the essence of her subjects either glimpsed or felt on her part: her paintings allow the viewer the same understanding of the thing seen that
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now survives only on her canvas, allow them, too, to share the impact of the first moment of seeing, the reason she stopped and reached for her pencil or crayon. Art – Kate’s included –confers immortality.
To see Kate’s paintings at home is to recognise the joyfulness of her absorption of wide-ranging influences of the artists she admires, including those represented in her own collection: Patrick Heron, Keith Vaughan, Ivon Hitchens. Like British painters before her, she balances the abstract and the figurative: her pictures prompt questions about the nature of representation and she partners geometric planes of bold colour with crisp detail and whispery pencil strokes. Current ideas of subjective reality – the ‘my truth’ of social media – are invariably selfish distortions: Kate’s ‘truth’, by contrast, helps us to see and admire things outside herself. Her approach recalls Matisse’s well-known distinction between truth and exactitude. Like Matisse, in her paintings Kate reconciles an object’s appearance and its nature or meaning. Her picture’s celebrate the power of the visual to move us – or, indeed, to halt us in our tracks. These are paintings that seize one by the hand. Magus-like, she reinvents the world for us.
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oil on board 51 × 51 cm
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Cardoon Overload, 2022
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The Yellow Chair, 2022
oil on board 38 × 76 cm
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Nasturtium, 2022
acrylic & crayon on board 38 × 76 cm
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Yellow Hammer, 2022
oil & collage on board 51 × 38 cm
Colour Field, 2022
oil on board 24 × 46 cm
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Noonday Shade, 2022
oil on board 29 × 49 cm
Summer Fields Aerial, 2022
oil on canvas 70 × 50 cm
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Walking Against the Wind, 2022
oil on board 19 × 20 cm
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Field Lines, 2022
oil & collage on board 15 × 25 cm
oil on canvas 80 × 140 cm
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Greenhouse, 2021
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July, 2022
oil on board 51 × 38 cm
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Terracotta, 2022
acrylic & oil on board 38 × 76 cm
Return from the West, 2022
oil on board 61 × 76 cm
Autumn Fields Aerial, 2022
oil on canvas 70 × 50 cm
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Snow, 2022
oil & graphite on card 23 × 38 cm
February, 2022
oil & graphite on board 16 × 34 cm
The Sky was Good for Flying, 2022
oil & graphite on board 13 × 32 cm
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Matilda’s Planter, 2022
oil on board 51 × 51 cm
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Paradise Poppies, 2022
mixed media on board 51 × 38 cm
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Plinog, 2022
oil on wood 17 × 24 cm
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Reckless Wind, 2022
oil on paper 35 × 30 cm
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Geography of Shade, 2022
oil & collage on paper 33 × 25.5 cm
Forests
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of the Mind, 2022
oil & collage on paper 31 × 20.5 cm
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Sonnets and Birds Descend, 2022
oil on paper 38 × 28 cm
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The Falling Cliff, 2022 oil on card 34 × 29 cm
oil on board 61 × 76 cm
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Hall of the Forest, 2022
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oil on board 38 × 51 cm
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Figs After Milton Avery, 2022
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Filtering Through Leaves, 2022
oil on board 51 × 51 cm
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The Undared Ocean, 2022 oil & collage on paper 40 × 31 cm
Remembrance, 2022
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oil & collage on board 51 × 64 cm
August, 2022
oil on board 51 × 38 cm
Under the Canopy, 2022
oil on board 76 × 61 cm
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For Christina, 2022
mixed media & oil on board 38 × 76 cm
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Jubilee, 2022
oil on board 51 × 38 cm
KATE CORBETT-WINDER
Kate Corbett-Winder was born in 1956. She studied fashion and journalism and worked at Vogue before marrying William and moving to mid Wales. Throughout the 1980s and 90s she began painting and drawing while continuing to work as a freelance magazine journalist. She has also written four books, including Vogue, More Dash than Cash and The Barn Book.
Corbett-Winder began exhibiting her art in the mid 1990s, starting with a solo show of landscapes at the Sladmore Gallery in 2009. She was represented by Crane Kalman Gallery and Jonathan Clark Fine Art before joining Long & Ryle, where she had her first show, Close to Home, in 2021.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2021
Sketchbook from Tresco, Long & Ryle
Close to Home, Long & Ryle
2019
Garden Paintings, Jonathan Clark Fine Art
2016
March Lands, Jonathan Clark Fine Art
2009
A Year in the Landscape, Sladmore Contemporary
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2019
Table Gallery, Hay-on-Wye
2017
Moncrieff Bray, Petworth
2012
Crane Kalman Gallery, London
2011, 2012
Albany Gallery, Cardiff
2010-18
Josie Eastwood Fine Art, Hampshire
2010
Sladmore Contemporary, London
2009, 2010
Silk Top Hat Gallery, Ludlow
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Catalogue © Long & Ryle, 2023
Works © Kate Corbett-Winder
Essay © Matthew Dennison
Design: Graham Rees Design
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LONG & RYLE
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