Kate Giles : Remember Tomorrow
KATE GILES: REMEMBER TOMORROW opens on April 25th at Gainsborough's House in Suffolk in celebration of 250 years of John Constable. Alongside an exhibition by David Dawson (Lucian Freud's long term studio assistant) both contemporary artists will be paying tribute to Constable's legacy.
Gainsborough's House presents new and recent paintings by acclaimed painter, Kate Giles, who has made some of the most vital depictions of landscape in recent times. The exhibition is a key part of the Spring/Summer Season at Gainsborough's House, celebrating the 250th anniversary of John Constable’s birth.
Giles is a contemporary artist who for many years has focused on a keen and intimate vision of the landscape of her native East Anglia, one of Britian's great artistic landscapes. Her vision of the Suffolk and Norfolk landscape has long been influenced by landscapes painters such as Jacob van Ruisdael (1628-82), whose epic paintings of Netherlandish land and sky feel closely assimilated to East Anglia, Amsterdam being only 134 miles from its coastline. However, it is the Suffolk-born landscape painter, John Constable (1776-1837), who has been her artistic rudder for the last couple of decades, encouraging her to focus on the materiality of paint and familiarity of subject in order to, ‘conjure a sense of the visceral immediacy of presence (light, shadow, weather, season, what the ground is like to walk on)’. For Giles as much as landscape painting is about a sense of place, it is an observation on the powerful effect of nature on our senses.
The exhibition will feature several of Giles’s meditations on Constable’s six-foot wide, ‘Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows’, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1831, a series that she began work on in 2007, shortly after moving to Suffolk.
Primarily, it will showcase paintings and drawings completed in the last year, several of which explicitly refer to Constable’s earlier ‘six-footer’, The Leaping Horse (1825), depicting the River Stour between Flatford and Dedham that he knew intimately. Constable described The Leaping Horse as, ‘lively – & soothing – calm and exhilarating, fresh – & blowing’, and it is this dual energy, as also found in the full-scale sketch, that Giles has responded to fervently.
Kate Giles: “How I work is dependent on a deepening familiarity with place, a repetitive mining of it until ‘known by heart’. Close to Constable’s idea of painting as doggedly driving in a nail. Working in series, often on several pieces at the same time, allows for something different to emerge with every piece whilst fundamentally allowing the materiality of paint as something with a life of its own.’
