Kate Bright: Between the Woods, 2008
Text by Judith E. Stein
26 pages, Softcover
Published by Locks Art Publications
ISBN: 978-1-879173-54-5
The works presented in this publication mark the second exhibition for Kate Bright at Locks Gallery. They are all new paintings from 2007-08. As in her previous work, Bright looks to the natural landscape and in these works, depicts snow-laden trees. Rather than straight-forward representational landscape painting, Bright, an urbanite, paints from memory and photographic images of pastoral locations she has lived, visited, and accumulated. She exerts control over her trees and imbues the works with her own sense of idealized beauty - applying glitter to the canvas in order to transform simple subject matter. In her catalog essay, critic and independent curator Judith Stein observes that the application of glitter comes with its own implications: "The quest for sublimity, that mingling of astonishment and awe before the majesty of nature, is infrequently expressed as a goal of art in this day and age, and even rarer to find linked to a de-based material. But we must take Bright at her word: it is sincerity that fuels her practice." She goes on to celebrate Bright for her paintings of "illusory brilliance."
