After seeing my work in the exhibition DWELLING OF THE IMAGINATION at the Laurent Delaye Gallery until 21.04.24, the writer, curator and poet Paul Carey-Kent interviewed me around the subject of my painting Mother’s Milk | Winter Flowering Blossom in Jug.
Paul Carey-Kent presents ‘Pauls Gallery of the Week’ in FAD magazine. Paul also writes for Artlyst along with another of my curator/art writer dear friends, Nico Kos Earle.
As one of his many ‘eccentric’ projects, Paul Carey-Kent is currently interviewing artists who paint flowers, as to the meaning of their works.
Below you can read his report after the conversation:
Kate Beaugié: ‘Mother’s Milk | Winter Flowering Blossom in Jug’ 2024 – currently on view at Laurent Delaye Gallery in Ramsgate.
Multi-disciplinary artist Kate Beaugie found that lockdown led her to concentrate more on painting. Moreover, she recently moved house into the countryside a few miles out of Canterbury, and has felt ‘so much more involved and invested in the cycle of the seasons; the growth, life, decay and death / hibernation and quiet period of winter. Natural order is continuing to integrate its rhythm into my practice’. When you see blossom, she says, ‘something opens in your heart’. She captures that with a presence edging towards the spiritual: ‘I don’t believe in God’, she says, ‘but I do see myself as a translator for something bigger’.
Beaugié concentrates on light rather than colour: greys are unusually dominant for a floral picture – ‘everyone longs for colour’, she admits, ‘but I refuse point blank’. That said, she doesn’t actually own any black paint, and subtle colours do appear: in her words ‘the colour of the pink blossom is the focus that breaks through the monotone, bringing with it the flush of life’. Beaugié traces her restrained palette back to her sculpture degree at Glasgow, when the quality of the Scottish dark inspired her to fill a room with coal, onto which she threw blossom. She then – in 2001 – travelled to Japan and ‘went around chasing the blossom, which had just finished in Tokyo’. She cites the simplicity of manga, as well as the calm control of Vermeer and Hammershøi, and Turrell’s way with light, as influences. Beaugié also loves classical music, and listened obsessively to Ravel while painting this. The blooms are painted first, quickly before they start to wilt, aiming to use just one stroke per petal. The background comes later, and she says a tablecloth’s surface – especially if unironed! – ‘helps to see what’s going on with the light’. She suggests that her instinctive title comes from finding comfort in nature, comparable to a baby’s comfort at the breast, as well as honouring and exploring the beauty of natural phenomena.
Paul Carey-Kent 11.03.24 on Instagram @paulcareykent
Paul has also written a series of short poems accompanied by photographs of his recent near death experience of grade 4 bowel cancer. It’s a compelling, disturbing and brilliant read, soon to be published:
Thank you Paul for your focus.
Kate Beaugié | blog 