Kitty Reford
Kitty Reford is a painter and printmaker who lives and works in Essex. She holds a degree in Fine Art from Canterbury College of Art, an MA in Painting from the Royal Academy Schools and an MA in Printmaking from Camberwell College of Art.
She shows regularly including at the RA Summer Exhibition, the International Original Print Exhibition at Bankside, Woolwich Comntemporary, and the Discerning Eye. She also shows with the LOOP collective of printmakers at Bankside Gallery and other recent exhibitions include a one person show at North House Gallery.
She has taught for many years in further and higher education.
Artist Statement
Though I am a figurative painter, the objects and shapes that inhabit my work present as colour or shape or viscosity. In that plastic sense it doesn't much matter what else they are, though, saying that, I love titles and often there are stories there too. They can happen either way round, either because they'll insinuate themselves as part of the subject matter, or because they're insinuated to solve a technical or a formal problem. I'm interested also in space and lack, and painting nothing.
There are different things at different times that are important to me about a painting, but it is always more than a representation of a thing. Peculiarly, I sometimes think, it usually is about a thing. There's a narrow space between figuration and abstraction which I like to inhabit. I feel at home there. I like ambiguity. Paint is stuff and you paint on a surface that can be of many sorts. I like painting that contains evidence of this process, leaving it accessible and allowing space for a delve into its making.
Painting and maybe more especially drawing (because it is often quicker, and in a particular location) has a diaristic quality; unsummoned by you, it is just there. You remember so much of the occasion of drawing or making that is irrelevant to the process, the intention or the result. I don't know if it matters that this is invisible and unimportant to a viewer of the work. .
