Katharine Le Hardy

Katharine Le Hardy

BORN: 1980

The Cornish coast is the starting point for her landscapes which are only loosely based on definate locations. Working from sketches and photographs, Katherine endeavours to create a window on an imaginary coastal space. The absence of obvious landmarks and identifiable features enables the images to exist as timeless dreamlike expanses where sea meets land, inviting the viewer into a restorative space and opportunity for reflection in calm solitude.

Even though the beach usually constitutes the largest area in her paintings, Katherine considers them more as seascapes than landscapes, as the central aspect to all of her images is the action and nature of the sea: both as a symbol for the passage of time and agent of change, and also as an icon for tranquility and emotional depth, all of which is resonant with the ebb and flow of everyday human life. In a way, her painting process mimics the sea in this respect – she likes to use gestural marks and loose brushwork to engage the viewer and charge the composition with movement and dynamism, whilst still maintaining balance, building up the paint and alternating transparent and opaque layers, dripping, washing, splashing, allowing it to take its own fluid course and give the image a life of its own.