Estuary Dreams

Jenny Pery meets Kate Westbrook,
an artist for whom music is as important as painting

Early Spring, Erme Estuary 2003 gouache on paper 330x500mm Click on image for larger view

Kate Westbrook's sketchbooks are like visual diaries, filled with small drawings and watercolours of the places she visits on her walks around the Erme Estuary near her home in Holbeton. The drawings in these diaries are the seed-corn for larger drawings and paintings made in the studio. She works in various different mediums - charcoal, pastel, gouache and oil - and as she explores her subject each painting becomes more densely worked and richly patterned, suffused with intense reds and blues shot through with pinks, ochres and saffron yellows. All her subjects are within walking distance of her house, and after 12 years in the area, she knows the landscape intimately, enjoying drawing a well-understood subject In different seasons and at different times of day. She loves the early morning light on the thickly wooded clefts and coves around the Erme Estuary, and the moonlight on the village rooftops. Her paintings, like Samuel Palmer's, seem to pulsate with a magical inner light. They are unashamedly romantic, portraying a serene natural world where, under a late winter sun or the ghost of a moon, trees put on their leaves. birds glide overhead, fish leap in the river, and snug houses jostle peacefully together.

Strong rhythms run through all Kate Westbrook's work, and the musical analogies are so clear that it seems some paintings could almost be read like a musical score. Starburst trees make complicated chords; pointillist, staccato marks like treble or bass notes are placed between wavy, watery staff lines. The grid she uses to square up paintings suggest a measured beat over which the tune of the composition is laid. Music is a major element in Kate Westbook's life.

Having grown up In Canada and in the Unites States before going to Dartington Hall School, then studying art in Bath and Reading and teaching for some years at Leeds School of Art, she joined the band of the jazz composer Mike Westbrook as a singer and librettist for his operas. She has performed as a singer all over Europe. She now combines singing and song-writing with painting, each discipline enriching the other. Her paintings are a very personal synthesis of these two elements in her life.

Jenny Pery
DEVON LIFE