Katherine’s comment on the shifting world

Deloraine’s Kath Willmott at the Eskeligh Summer exhibition with her winning painting The Shifting.

Photo supplied

Sharon Webb

KATHERINE WILLMOTT’S childhood finger painting ignited her a love of transparency and colour, and set the scene for her recent win in the Launceston Art Society Summer Exhibition at Eskleigh.

Her work, The Shifting, is an acrylic on canvas, a semi- abstract comment on our contantly shifting world, both environmentally and socially.

‘I like to find hidden worlds within our obvious environments’, Kath said.

‘Having lived in Tasmania two years now, I’ve found a medium I haven’t tried before, acrylics on canvas. It is perfect for the clouds and landscapes now surrounding me.’

The competition’s judge, Tasmanian artist and art teacher Trudy Humphries, described The Shifting as having ‘strength and rhythm, and shape and colour flicks’.

‘It carries well from a distance, with variations through drawing, texture and hard and soft lines’, she said. ‘The work holds the judge’s interest in its texture,line,colour and shapes.’

Ms Humphries judged 52 works, all from Launceston Art Society members.

Exhibition co-ordinator Aileen Gough said COVID-19 had placed limits on artists so there was no theme for them to work to this year.

Kath’s art has been influenced by her watercolour artist mother and a youth spent surrounded by the plants and flowers in her family’s nursery.

At TAFE she discovered a love of printmaking while bringing up a family. At university she majored in fibre art and printmaking.

Then all art faded into the background while Kath lived on a sailing vessel for 10 years.

‘Photography became the medium to capture ideas. Water, light, reflections became the new muse’, she said.

Since moving to Tasmania, Kath has also been highly commended in the Great Western Tiers Art Award.

The Summer Exhibition can be seen on Saturdays and Sundays, 10am to 3.30pm at Eskleigh, Perth, until 25 April.