Kate Montgomery's paintings often suggest interior spaces associated with female responsibility, creativity and desire – silent houses with children outside, workrooms, a costume gallery. Real time and space are avoided, permitting personal histories and storytelling narratives to be read.
"Lay patches of colour on a board and the board will stay flat, yet its flatness may start to flower. In the right hands, its surface enfolds, becomes intricate, as if this patch speaking to that, like one petal to another, drew you into their conversation. This basic magic of painting is raised to heights of subtlety in Kate Montgomery's art. Here is a fully arrived original who has opted for her own constraints. Let the board be smooth blond birch ply; lay the pigments down in casein, which, buffed to a slight sheen, presents the viewer with a dense warm evenness of tone. Emphatically, then, there is no depth, and the picture declares itself a compact assemblage of interlocking colour units designed to adorn a room." - Julian Bell
Kate Montgomery graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1992. She produces small scale detailed paintings in casein (a traditional milk based paint similar to egg tempera). The construction of pictorial space and concern for colour and pattern demonstrating her long relationship with Moghul miniature painting and medieval cloisonne and illumination.
Kate lives on the south coast: sources for her paintings are found through walking in the Sussex countryside, running by the sea, and the interiors and gardens of Georgian and Victorian houses and museums in Brighton and Hove.
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