Around the world with a sketch-book

By Andrew Clarke

Southwold artist Katherine Hamilton is a lucky woman. She has engineered her life so that she can travel the world capturing the colour and the vibrancy not only of different parts of the globe but also different people and different cultures.

In her latest exhibition this prolific globetrotter is able to contrast scenes from her home town of Southwold with paintings which capture life in South America, Venice and India.

Katherine is quick to point out that although she goes on at least a couple of trips a year, she spends the vast majority of her time toiling away in her studio creating her vast canvases which manage to be both atmospheric and colourful.

Shadows play an enormous part in Katherine's work along with the placing of people in the environment she is interpreting on canvas. People and the way they interact with one another and with the landscape is the key to her work.

Katherine takes the view that people are integral to the world around them. People, for better or worse, have changed and influenced the environment in which they live.

Katherine does not do empty landscapes, there always someone tucked away somewhere or evidence of human habitation. Even in the remote farmlands of Western Guatemala, Katherine includes the figure of a farmer walking through the well ordered stepped-fields.

“The reason for this is that the landscape here although traditional is entirely man-made. The multi-levelled fields define this part of the world. They are stepped to prevent the stop soil from being washed away by the rains. I am very interested in man's connection with whatever he is doing with his environment.

“Funnily enough there were many more figures in this picture which I have reduced to just one. It was a chance element which just made the picture. That happens a lot - you have to be alert to these opportune moments which can transform your work. To be honest it is the human element which fascinates me - not the landscape itself.”

Katherine loves going off the beaten track when she travels. She's not one for the tourist routes. “I want to see how people live their

lives in other parts of the world. I don't want to see mirror images of western life. I want to capture a flavour of life in the rural areas - where the daily routine hasn't changed for many hundreds of years.

“I try and make myself as inconspicuous as possible but to be honest it's pretty difficult simply because of the colour of my skin. I

usually hide behind a large hat and sunglasses and try and melt into the background but in the sort of places I go to you don't normally see any white people.”

One such place where Katherine found it difficult to blend in was a camel fair in Rajasthan where not only was she the only white person there she was also the only woman present.

“It pays to know a few well chosen swear words in the local dialect.” She said that when it came to creating a painting with atmosphere - tone and shadow was as important as colour or texture. “I think it also depends on where you are working. If you are working in Africa you are blasted with colour but if you are back in England naturally has shadow and I think in the Mediterranean you have incredibly deep shadows and strong colours which play off each other.”

She said that as an artist and as a traveller she is more interested in rural life because it is more likely to have kept the feel of their native culture. Rural areas are more resistant to the process of globalisation.

She said that she carries her sketchbook with her wherever she goes which is why there are several Southwold and Walberswick paintings in this latest collection. They are all scenes which suddenly triggered a reaction within her when she stumbled across them. In many ways they are similar scenes to her more exotic pictures from the far flung corners of the globe.

They are pictures capturing local people interacting with their landscape and again captured either early in the morning or in the evening. Several of the local pictures catch the feeling of restfulness that Southwold engenders.

Summer 2006 Southwold, Evening Falls, Southwold, Fisherman, Harbour Mouth, Southwold, Boating Lake, Southwold and Couple Sleeping, Southwold - all create a feeling of restful timelessness. It's an oasis from the hurly burly of 21st century life.

Quiet, evocative scenes all feature people at their ease basking in the low sun. Elsewhere Katherine tends to portray people meeting in market places or conversing in public spaces. She seeks out spots where people naturally congregate and form part of a community.

As a former dancer she loves to capture movement - the rhythm of life as she refers to it. Consequently she tends to see life in terms of movement and is drawn to the shapes created by the human body when performing everyday tasks - images capturing the bustle of the market place.

“I love watching people and recording events as they unfold before me. In some ways you are something like an amateur anthropologist as you record a daily routine which can date back for a thousand years or more.”

She said that her paintings are not literal snapshots of one moment in time but are rather a collage of images which happen during the time she is busy sketching.

Katherine is an observer - she stands back and records life as it unfolds before her and there are usually a clutch of on-lookers or passers by included in most of her works.

While most of her works are works are figurative, occasionally she does create an almost an abstract painting by coming in close and concentrating on the shapes ands colours of people milling about in a market place. “It is not done consciously. Abstractation comes from stripping things down to the essentials. It is a sea of colour which is created by focussing in on the people and what they are wearing. I love paintings where the more you look at them, the more you see. I like the fact that you can keep coming back to a picture and finding new things in it.”

Another elusive characteristic to be found in Katherine's work is a sense of serenity - a feeling of tranquillity which permeates its way through her work. Her paintings frequently capture busy, bustling communities hard at work but there is also a wonderful sense of belonging and peace which arises out of the scene.

“Markets are so busy and noisy and yet there is a sense of peace. It's a place where people do business but it's also a place where they meet their friends, catch up on all the news and events… and if someone is not there then something must be wrong and someone is sent to investigate.”

Katherine's life can be seen as one big adventure. In 1971, at the age of 17, she went to Italy to study art with Signorina Simi in Florence before joining the Byam School of Art in London.

“When I came back to Britain, I rapidly became disillusioned with art. I was not happy with the way I was being taught. I felt I wasn't gaining anything from the experience, so I went back to concentrate my energies on dance.”

Katherine was accepted at the London School of Contemporary Dance after a rigorous audition and for four years studied ballet, modern dance, choreography and music notation which she says has shaped her art and her love of capturing the human figure in

motion.

Having graduated from the London School of Contemporary Dance, Katherine spent the next six years as a professional dancer and

choreographer but continued to paint and draw in quiet moments.

Then in 1980, her then husband, gained a high-profile job as field director for Save The Children Fund in Ethiopia. Katherine said that she had no real qualms at giving up her teaching and performing work in London to join her husband in north Africa.

“We were based in Addis Ababa and I wanted something to do, and I discovered a huge theatre complex which had been built by

Mussolini, so I went in to the director there, told him who I was, what I did, and he just broke into a huge grin and told me that I must have been sent by God.

“I'll never forget it. It does your ego no end of good being told something like that. It sets you up for life,” she laughs. “I was given the job of developing dance in the community. We had to give performances before President Mengistu, who was a terrifying man. I had to find 30 children to form this dance company.

We had something like 150 children turn up barefoot, having walked for miles and we auditioned them and worked with a percussionist. I worked there for about 18 months before we left.

“I was still painting and drawing all through this period. It was after I left Ethiopia that I decided that I wanted to really concentrate on my art again. I felt I had gone as far as I wanted to go with dance and the need to return to painting was overwhelming.”

She and her husband then moved to Italy for a brief period, before moving onto the Drome region of southern France, then the Pyrenees before finally settling in Majorca for five years.

This fairly stable period ended when she and her first husband divorced. She returned to Britain and moved in with her parents -

“which I hated”, she says.

It was during a dinner party that a friend of her parents told her that they had a cottage in north Suffolk near Beccles. “I thought this

sounded marvellous. I thought I would love to live near a place called Beccles and Bungay. I went up to stay for a weekend and immediately started looking for somewhere. It was that simple and we've been very happy here ever since.”

She said that although she loves north Suffolk, she does love travel and embarks on a major, month-long trip every year with a couple of extra weeks away to visit friends in the north of England and in Europe. She says that even on these short jaunts she can detect changes in national character. Life in the north of England and or in the foothills of the Pyrenees is very different from her daily routine on the north Suffolk coast.

“I love people and I love the world in which we live. It's what inspires me.”

Katherine Hamilton - Journeys East To West, is on show at The Chappel Galleries, near Colchester, until October 28.