GALLERY

KATHLEEN CADDICK

Kathleen was born in Liverpool in 1937 but brought up in Buckinghamshire. She says that, ‘it was the beech woods of the Chiltern hills, a landscape shaped by the chalk that must have subconsciously implanted a love of trees and the countryside’.

She won the Bucks Art Award in 1954 and studied at High Wycombe College of Art, graduating with a NDD Hons in Painting. She married a fellow student from college in 1958 and after having a son she began working as a freelance designer until 1963 when she taught art for a couple of years before starting to run a small design studio for a Printing firm near London and became an examiner for City & Guilds.

She began painting full-time in 1968 exhibiting with Galleries in London. Kathleen started etching in 1976 working mainly for a dealer in Bonn who over the next few years exhibited her work in all the main cities in West Germany. This was also the beginning of her association with Christie’s Contemporary Art (CCA) and did commissions for the National Trust and The Woodland Trust.

It was CCA who arranged for her to go to Japan in 1990 for a major exhibition of her paintings and etchings in Himiji and continued to feature and sell her work worldwide.

She has given talks and demonstrations to Art Societies and been a course tutor on painting and etching at Dillington House, Somerset and High Ham in Cumbria, until a couple of years ago.

Although spending more time painting now, Kathleen is best known for her etchings of trees silhouetted against winter skies with bleached grasses, cow parsley, distant hills and snow. This vision of the landscape, made up from a montage of half remembered places with subtle use of colour gives a feeling of space and tranquillity, and makes her work instantly recognizable.