Battersea Under Chelsea Painting

Contemporary artist Cathy Read draws with masking fluid, creating vibrant metropolitan perspectives that reflect city life in all its glory. Cathy Read re-imagines iconic architecture using explosive, colourful drops and trails of paint, held together with a structure of white lines. Inspired by looming and dramatic architecture. She draws on influences from various cities in the UK. In a previous life she worked as an Occupational Therapist using large art projects to help develop manual skills in children. Cathy is self-taught. Her earlier paintings were predominantly circle based abstracts. Later developing into urban landscapes, fuelled by a lifelong interest in buildings. A natural evolution after a childhood dominated by giant decaying mills in the North of England's Cotton industry Cathy exhibits her paintings around the UK, and Europe, and is in collections as far afield as Canada, Africa and New Zealand. Her painting of St Catherine's College Quad is in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The piece was commissioned by Oxford University Press, to illustrate the 2016 Oxford Almanack. Cathy Read is a member of the Society of Women Artists exhibiting with them in London since 2013, receiving the Barbara Tate Memorial Award in 2015. Cathy has also shown with the Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour in London. In 2021 she is participating in an International Exhibition at Chiba City Art Museum in Japan. Cathy appeared as a contestant on Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year in 2016. Returning as a wildcard in 2017. The same year, she was shortlisted for Artist and Illustrators Artist of the Year and received the Wild and Tame award. She lives in a chapel near Buckingham, in the UK, which she converted with her husband. It's close enough to London to get an Urban Architecture fix when needed. When Cathy's not steering 60ft of steel canal boat along the British waterways and wielding a windlass, she can be found splattering paint and singing loudly in her Buckinghamshire Studio.