About – Catherine Beale

Demonstrating at the SWA Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London (September 2022)

I am a painter specialising in light-filled watercolour and I love that it is such a mobile medium. The following paintings use its shape-shifting qualities to the full. I push them further with my ‘gravity painting’ techniques. (Music by Robbie and Dominic Beale.)

My painting practice began in 1996 Singapore with series of architectural oil studies on paper and pencil portrait commissions. The images of disappearing architecture sold at art fairs and in 1998 I was invited to hold my first solo exhibition at the British High Commission. My prints sold in galleries, hotels and Changi Airport and commissions followed from the US Embassy, Reuters, the British High Commission and British Club.

Club Street Corner, Middle Road, Tan Quee Lan Street (oils on paper); British High Commissioner’s Official Residence (early watercolour).

In 2006 I returned to the UK and set-up a studio/gallery in Bath. My oil portrait ‘The butterfly house’ was in the final of the Holburne Portrait Prize 2010 and went on to win The Artist Magazine Editor’s Choice Award at The Society of Women Artists’ 2013 Annual Exhibition.

My watercolour portrait ‘Robbie’ was selected to hang in the Mall Galleries with the Royal Watercolour Society in 2011 and in Bankside Gallery with the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours in 2012. By carefully controlling the way light falls on my portrait sitters, I create dramatic but intimate portrait commissions for families and individuals.

At the same time I was experimenting with watercolours using landscape and the subtle light of the atmospheric British weather to inspire my artistic practice. My 2010 exhibition ‘Atmospherics’ explored the mysterious subjects of mist, rays of sunlight and glittering reflected light.

Illumination (detail) – gravity painted watercolour on artboard.

My next step was to start using rigid surfaces. Artboard helps me to faithfully record the mingling of my cascading pigments within water as they react together naturally to create delicate veils of colour and colliding effects.
My ‘gravity painted’ landscapes sell at my solo exhibitions, as well as with the Bath Society of Artists and at First-View Gallery in Wiltshire. You can find out all about my exhibitions here.

A ‘dramatic skies’ workshop for Cornwall School of Art.

I explain my techniques in my own intensive Bath Watercolour Workshops, at art centres, art societies and in art magazines. Here is a short introduction to my methods.