Katy Bott

Katy moved to North Wales in 2015 and discovered the freedom of painting for herself, and the fascinating difficulties of expressing the reality of our present surroundings.  The mountains of the Carneddau and the local coastal areas were the initial focus for attempts to convey a mood through the use of form and colour.  Lately, Katy has become interested in the intimacy of interiors and small architectural scenes.

Katy says: "I attempt to use colour to capture more than the purely visual, because that is only one element of the whole experience.  Therefore, I am not always interested in reproducing what we might think of as the real colours of the landscape, but often seek to engender a heightened sense of the place through the use of an unexpected palette with strong contrasts and juxtapositions.  The subject of these paintings tends to be mountainous, tough, un-moving, weather-beaten.

I am thinking about the essential nature of the scene, not the details.  I am interested in how we know what we are looking at, how we understand the shape of the landscape, for example, even though it is a long way off.  How do I know that there is a dip there, a mound there, and a wall that follows the contours over there?  We interpret visual signs into a whole solid world, more or less successfully, and I want to see if I can put those visual signs down on the canvas in a way that is interesting, or beautiful, or mood-filled."