ARTIST STATEMENT

Contemporary artist Cathy Read draws with masking fluid, creating urban landscape paintings that reflect city life in all its glory. From the ground breaking designs of cutting edge architecture to the decaying remnants of a glorious past.  Each lovingly embraced in images full of detail.

Using vibrant colours of watercolour and acrylic ink, she conveys the mundane and the ordinary next to the glorious and spectacular. Cathy’s distinctive paintings depict geometric shapes and inherent patterns of architecture in a free, expressive style, where she brings the city to life.

Cathy draws inspiration for these paintings from time spent in London and other major cities, such as Manchester and Oxford.

Architecture paintings

Cathy’s paintings are snapshots.  She looks for contrast where they occur: such as new building with clean shapes and lines alongside old decaying ones or geometrics architecture softened by nature over time.

Buildings reflect the dreams of the people who create them.  By using an abstract technique, she captures that dreamlike quality.  The masking flued creates a linear structure which holds together the fluid and energetic paint and ink shapes.  The ink, especially allows mini explosions of colour which evolve during the drying process

There are two distinct groups

Looming Paintings

Iconic architecture of London forms the basis of these.  With these paintings Cathy looks for perspectives that convey the building’s scale.  That sense of awe at their sheer size.  By experimenting with angels, foreshortening and shapes she seeks the essence of the vision behind their creation and that childhood sense of looming where the building reels like it will topple onto you.

The Everyday

These are snapshots in time.  A taste of life going on around familiar streets and buildings.  Cathy looks for items in the foreground to convey a sense of depth in the scene.  She includes groups of people who tend to become fused with the landscape.  Street furniture, peeling paint and reflections on glass or water are common features.

Contemporary artist Cathy Read draws with masking fluid, creating urban landscape paintings that reflect city life in all it's glory.

Cathy Read re-imagines iconic architecture using explosive, colourful drops and trails of paint, held together with a structure of white lines. Inspired by looming and dramatic architecture. She draws on influences from various cities in the UK. Until 2006 she worked as an Occupational Therapist using large art projects to help develop manual skills in children. She had a private practice from 1996-2006.

Cathy is self taught. Embarking on an Art Journey in 2008, her earlier paintings were predominantly circle based abstracts. Later developing into urban landscapes, fuelled by a lifelong interest in buildings. A natural evolution after a childhood dominated by giant decaying mills in the North of England's Cotton industry.

Cathy exhibits her paintings around the UK, and Europe, Invited to join group exhibitions in Japan in 2021 and India in 2022. Her art is in collections as far afield as Canada, Africa and New Zealand. Oxford University Press commissioned Cathy to create the piece to illustrate the 2016 Oxford Almanack. The painting of St Catherine's College Quad is now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Other notable Commissions are for the Reception area of Bahlsen's UK Headquarters and to commemorate 600 years of the Royal Latin School in Buckingham.

Cathy Read is a member of the Society of Women Artists exhibiting with them in London since 2013, receiving the Barbara Tate Memorial Award in 2015. Cathy has also shown with the Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour in London.

Cathy appeared as a contestant on Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year in 2016. Returning as a wildcard in 2017. The same year, she was shortlisted for Artist and Illustrators Artist of the Year and received the Wild and Tame award.

She lives in a chapel near Buckingham, in the UK, which she converted with her husband. It's close enough to London to get an Urban Architecture fix when needed.

When Cathy's not steering 60ft of steel canal boat along the British waterways and wielding a windlass, she can be found splattering paint and singing loudly in her Buckinghamshire Studio.