Catalogue for Kate Bentley's solo exhibition at Morningside Gallery May 2025
MORNINGSIDE GALLERY
KATE BENTLEY RI RSW Two Worlds
03.05.25 - 18.05.25
MORNINGSIDE GALLERY
KATE BENTLEY RI RSW
SELECTED EXHIBITION HISTORY Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh 2024 - 22,2019,2017 Society of Women Artists Annual Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London. 2024 - 22, 2020 - 3, 2010 - 05 Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour Annual Exhibition, Mall Galleries. London 2024 - 22, 2020, 2018, 2017, 2014, 2013, 2010, 2008 Society of Scottish Artists - Scottish Royal Academy 2021, 2022 & Dalkeith Palace 2024 Morningside Gallery, Edinburgh 2025 - 22 Glasgow Art Club - Scottish Prize for Fine Art Exhibition - 2023
Women in Art Fair, The Mall Galleries, London - 2023 Discerning Eye Exhibition, The Mall Galleries -2023 Society of Scottish Artists - Maclaurin Gallery, 2023 - 24 Royal Society of British Artists, Annual Exhibition, The Mall Galleries, London 2024 - 22 New English Art Club 2022 Royal Society of Marine Artists Annual - 2021, 2023 SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2024 - Kimono Journeys, Morningside Gallery, Edinburgh. 2023 - Kimono Stories, The Whitehouse Gallery, Kirkcudbright 2022 - ‘Ruskin’s Reverie No 2’ at The Blue Gallery, Brantwood, 2020 - 21 - ‘Ruskin’s Reverie’ Artist in Residence Exhibition, Brantwood, Coniston. 2017- ‘Ophelia’, Bellwood &Wright Fine Art Gallery, Lancaster 2015 - ‘Drama in the Dales’, The Lime Gallery, Settle. 2013 - ‘Skyline’ The Lime Gallery, Settle. 2011 - ‘The Darker side of Light’, Severn Studio, Brantwood, Coniston PRIZES, AWARDS AND MEMBERSHIPS 2024 - Awarded membership to the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours 2023 -The Sea Pictures Gallery Award - Royal Society of Marine Painters Annual Exhibition 2023 -The Hosking House Trust Prize - 6th Annual Women’s Emerging Artist Painting Award 2023 - Awarded membership to the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours 2022 -The John Wood Award- The Holly Bush Emerging Woman Painter Prize, London 2020 - 3rd Prize -The Holly Bush Emerging Woman Painter Prize, London
I’m fortunate to live by the sea in South West Scotland. My studio and house are comfortably settled in a 2.5 acre plot with both wild and tamed gardens surrounding me. My garden is my yang, my paintings my ying. Both feed off each other and I benefit from both mental and physical stimulation as a result. My garden is reflected in all my windows and doors; it’s very much inside outside and outside inside. My house is also full of plants. My use of reflective surfaces as inspiration in my work has been developing over the last seven years and my photography of this subject matter, although rarely used to copy from directly, helps me to resolve issues in my work and assists in the propagation of my ideas. This way of working has developed slowly. Eileadh has described my work as fractured and kaleidoscopic and I think she’s hit the nail on the head. I feel the need to break up line, to interrupt a view, to use suggestive mark making, to layer up and to simplify all at the same time. This need is for my own interest essentially but I hope it also engages the viewer, makes them work hard to understand an area, and most importantly, for them to draw on their own interpretation of a scene and make a connection to a memory. My son moved to Edinburgh a few years ago which gave me reason to visit more often. There is something comfortable and un-threatening about the town; the hills and proximity of the sea are familiar to me and the architecture, history and gardens are all subject areas that I find inspiring. There is a sense of the many lives that have lived here, and the various epochs that the city has endured and been shaped by.
Kate Bentley RI RSW April 2025
INTRODUCTION
It is with great pleasure that I introduce our first solo exhibition of Kate Bentley’s paintings. Kate’s explorative nature and unique imagination has created a truly striking collection of paintings which explore two main subjects – Edinburgh as a city and Kate’s love of gardens – her own, those of her imagination and the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. Two main subjects, Two Worlds, and an artist equally at home in the city and coastal South West Scotland where she is based. Beyond the obvious differences in subject matter, the idea of two worlds also underpins the way Kate engages with her subjects and her materials. The interplay of the real and the imagined is present in all of Kate’s paintings, along with fearless experimentation and an urge to tear up the rule book. Her location and the landscape hugely influences her subject matter and in many ways Kate is a ‘painter of life’, using traditional methods of en-plein air sessions and life drawing to create her work. Other paintings start with the mark making, and Kate works with the shapes and colours she creates to begin to bring some realism into the work, to tease out a subject. More often than not, as soon as realism begins to tip the balance within a painting, Kate disrupts the flow, breaks the line, moves the viewer’s eye into another field or onto another detail elsewhere. Sometimes paintings which feel complete are stripped back - destroyed almost - and then layered up again, as she employs various techniques and materials - projected photographs, the reflection of her garden in the studio door, old paintings, unexpected patterns - to give the painting a completely new dimension. We see these techniques at play within many of her garden paintings, which are both botanical studies and imaginative narrative works in equal measure. Initially they burst forth with verdant yellows and greens, we see lush leaves and bright flowers, but also what might be a person, or is it just a reflection of a person? We look further and there are some steps. We walk down them and out beyond the painting … Perspective is thrown out of the window and the kaleidoscopic element in so many of Kate’s works makes it almost impossible to behold the scene complete upon first viewing. The effect can be quite dazzling, as light is used to both reflect and refract; at times it is as though we are seeing the subject through the reflections of a beautiful old mirror, distressed and fractured with age. There are moments of recognition before the line is broken again and we are taken somewhere else. Again, within Kate’s paintings of Edinburgh, reality is observed initially but soon replaced by a kaleidoscopic view of the city. Edinburgh is presented as a witness to the many stories told and lives lived, past and present. A city of beautiful gardens and breath-taking natural landmarks sitting side-by-side with historical architecture. Everything is here and all at once, as past and present, natural and human- made, real and imagined are woven together with colour, shape and pattern. The mark making in these paintings, like all of Kate’s work leads the eye to new places, new points of interest, and once the eye settles, journeying through the paintings feels like an adventure; both expansive and immensely satisfying. Eileadh Swan Gallery Director
Notes
All paintings are for sale and may be purchased or reserved prior to the exhibition opening. We kindly request that decisions on reserves are made by 5pm on Friday the 2nd of May.
AULD REEKIE | City of Stories
This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.
Alexander McCall Smith
The Golden Hour, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 99 x 75 cm, £3200
National Treasures, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 76 x 66 cm, £2500
LEFT Yellow Crane, Oil on Board, Framed Size 51 x 41 cm, £1400 R IGHT Yellow Skip, Yellow Lines, Oil on Board, Framed Size 51 x 40cm, £1400
Walks With My Son, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 99 x 75 cm £3200
This painting proved to be one of the most difficult to complete. After the initial mark making, and although I knew the painting was about an interior, I was unsure which interior! After a few months. I came across some old photos of the interior of the Scottish Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh and everything fell into place. This gallery and its interior made a huge impact on me at the time and what I didn’t want to do was to replicate it. So again, a long period of time passed before I could progress. The painting is a prime example of two worlds - the world in my head and the real world!
Portrait Of A Gallery Oil on Panel, Framed Size 137 x 94 cm, £6000
Historic Stairways, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 55 x 79 cm, £2400
Ginnels, Wynds and Geometry, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 66 x 76 cm, £2400
After my initial mark making I decided that this piece suggested an urban scene, mainly because of the blocky marks I had made. I couldn’t get the image of the painting by Bruegel of the Tower of Babel out of my mind and throughout the whole process that’s what kept returning to me. My painting however was based on Edinburgh, with Arthur’s Seat and the hills in the background, the iconic seating platform surrounding the castle for the tattoo, stairways and archways, which are so prevalent in the old town. As time went on, I didn’t feel the need to remain with Bruegel’s composition and I introduced elements that are significant to Edinburgh‘s landscape…. the iconic bridges down in the bottom foreground of the painting, the Christmas Ferris wheel in Princes Street Gardens and just mere suggestions of historic buildings. And all the while fracturing the images, disrupting the idea of a single narrative or story of Edinburgh.
Auld Reekie and The Tower of Babel Oil on Panel, Framed Size 175 x 132 cm, £11000
LEFT Bridge and Skyline, Oil on Board, Framed Size 37 x 31 cm, £595 R IGHT Fresh and Verdant, Oil on Board, Framed Size 37 x 31 cm, £595 OPPOS I TE Anything Goes, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 75 x 99 cm, £3200
Dusk, Oil on Board, Framed Size 65 x 55 cm, £2100
LEFT Winter Light, Oil on Board, Framed Size 55 x 45 cm, £1400 R IGHT Above the Train Line, Oil on Board, Framed Size 37 x 31 cm, £595
INTO THE GARDENS | City and Home
Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them. John Ruskin
The Sanctuary , Oil on Panel, Framed Size: 137 x 95 cm, £6000
I was astounded by the Botanic Gardens upon my first visit. The scene here doesn’t exist, it was the mark making on the initial canvas that suggested the composition. I wanted to get the feeling of height, with the city situated at the top, and I used steps, archways and pathways to bring us down to a sanctuary of trees and foliage below.
TOP Rheum Palmatum by the Chinese Bridge, Mixed Media on Board, Framed Size 39 x 39 cm £995 BELOW Rheum Palmatum, Mixed Media on Board, Framed Size 37 x 37 cm, £995 OPPOS I TE City Haven, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 137 x 95 cm £6000
Flower Bed , Oil on Panel, Framed Size 137 x 137 cm, £7400
ABOVE The Orangery, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 76 x 57 cm, £2400 OPPOS I TE First Home, First Garden, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 99 x 75 cm, £3200
This painting was started in the depths of winter. I was desperate to use colour and once again the shapes I initially made suggested flowers and plants. I felt that by incorporating some geometric shapes representing structural elements such as greenhouses and buildings, would help bring this cacophony of colour and shape into some kind of order. Sometimes when I have a painting that comes to a junction I will project another painting or a photograph I’ve taken over the top of the mark making and the colour blocks to try and tease out the direction it needs to take.
The Potting Shed , Oil on Panel, Framed Size 137 x 137 cm, £7000
This painting was originally started en-plein air, in my garden, in the summer. I initially wanted to concentrate on the flower shapes and the negative space between the plants and the leaves. What tends to happen however, is the more I use reality and the subject matter in front of me, the more frustrated I become. I find myself wanting to change what I can see in some way and this is how this painting developed. Eventually I was looking at photos that I taken of reflections of my garden in the windows of my studio and my studio doors and I was inspired to replicate this effect in the painting. This then helped to take the painting away from literal representation, to suggest the possibility of a different visual and emotional dimension.
When Outside Becomes Inside Oil on Panel, Framed Size: 155 x 115 cm £9800
LEFT The City Balcony Garden, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 57 x 76 cm £2400 R IGHT Clematis Alpina and Rheum Palmatum, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 61 x 76 cm, £2400 OPPOS I TE The Importance of Pollinators, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 137 x 99 cm, £6500
I have been growing kale over the autumn and winter. The shapes are amazing, the colour beautiful, their shadows are just crying out to be painted. However, it wasn’t until I took a visit to the Scottish National Gallery When I saw a painting by Arthur Melville called the ‘Cabbage Garden’, side-by-side with James Guthrie’s ‘A Hind’s daughter’ that I formulated a plan to come up with the theme of this quite un- conventional painting.
Cauli, Kale and Cabbage, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 133 x 95 cm £6000
Favourite Things, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 99 x 75 cm £3200
The Architects House, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 99 x 75 cm £3200
IMAGINED GARDENS | Here and There
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. Marcel Proust
Bathed in Light, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 99 x 75 cm £3200
6am, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 58 x 60 cm £2200
ABOVE Yellow Hat, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 76 x 57 cm, £2400 OPPOS I TE The Japanese Garden, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 76 x 92 cm £3200
This painting began on a day when really what I wanted to do was to be outside in my garden. So what better thing to do than to paint sumptuous flower shapes from memory and on a huge scale for fun and to fill the canvas with colour. To me, in my mind it was a windy autumn day in the garden. After a lot of head scratching the outside flowers then became the inside windowsill flowers so that I could continue with the theme of my windy autumn day. I could retain the figure which originally had been more prominent in the painting but was now present as a supporting role. I also decided to use the Fibonacci spiral principle in this piece to make it more cohesive.
The Autumn Garden Oil on Panel, Framed Size 115 x 100 cm, £5200
ABOVE The French Garden, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 45 x 36 cm £995 OPPOS I TE 5.30am, Oil on Panel, Framed Size: 57 x 76cm £2400
LEFT The Impressionist’s Garden, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 36 x 45 cm £995 R IGHT Beauty Spot, Oil on Panel, Diameter 30cm £895
R IGHT Chinese Pavilion, Oil on Board, Framed Size 33 x 28 cm £495 LEFT The Windowsill Garden, Oil on Panel, Framed Size 33 x 57 cm £995
The Wedding Garden, Oil on Board, Framed Size: 57 x 45 cm £1400
MORNINGSIDE GALLERY 94 Morningside Road, Edinburgh, EH10 4BY 0131 447 3041 | art@morningsidegallery.co.uk | www.morningsidegallery.co.uk
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