Kate Dolan

Kate Dolan (b.1985) is a self-taught abstract colourist originally from Leeds, UK. After graduating in 2007 she spent years working in advertising ignoring her instinct to create but in 2016 she decided to get back to her creative roots and pick up a paintbrush. Kate was painting in London for five years and since March 2022 has been working from her studio in Perth, Western Australia. 

Kate's large-scale canvases consist of graphic painterly lines and big expanses of colour. Often struck with colour inspiration at random moments, from the colour of a house, an outfit she has seen on a stranger and quite often from nature. Her pictures reveal captured moments. Slices of time. Whatever is happening in her life is reflected in her paintings. 

In her most recent series of work titled 'This Light' you will find vibrant, saturated colour palettes and fearless mark-making, something she accredits to the newly found space she has in both her day-to-day life and also her studio. Driven by her emotions, her work is reactive, intuitive and organic. Kate classes herself as a true expressive painter who will create numerous automatic studies at the start of a new series and some of those studies she will translate onto large canvases. From there she will work instinctively.  

''I try not to plan my canvases too much, I just let them happen. I always start with pastels to mark out the composition and then it is a matter of feeling my way around the painting from one stroke to the next. Or perhaps I will get obsessed with a colour or shape I have seen that week and I'll change the painting to make it fit.  Random things from my subconscious will creep into my paintings and only when I look back can I make the link. I see lots of reoccurring motifs in my latest series; seaweed, decked paths and of course, sunshine. 

The works on paper I have shared with Wills are studies for the first series of work I have made in in Australia. 'Tree', 'Seaweed', 'Sunset', 'Vases', 'Three Firs 'are all themes that you will see in my new paintings. 'Bather with Parasol' and 'Woven' came with me to Perth but I started them in London in 2021. Originally part of my 'This Place' series - I finished the paintings in Australia so you will see glimpses of both periods. I'm thankful I captured the transition in these works''