Art - HQ Gallery Winter Show

The first thing I’m told about Kate Montgomery’s art is that it has a medieval quality to it, and when I go to see the work she has hung at the HQ Gallery, as part of its Winter Show, I can see just that. Though I can’t for the life of me put my finger on why. The pictures are slightly stylised narrative slices, often containing young girls, and changing screens, and animals. They are very colourful and rather beautiful, and make you want to look at them and wonder at them.

I speak to Kate on the phone, with images of the pictures in front of me on my screen. “It’s the patterns that give them the medieval look,” she says. “I use a lot of patterns in my pictures, and I take them from medieval and Indian and Victorian designs.” I look again, and sure enough there are several different patterns in every painting. On the floor, on the walls, on the curtains, on the furnishings. The patterns are completely different from one another, but somehow, almost miraculously, they don’t clash. “When I was a child,” says Kate, “I lived in an old house which my parents never redecorated. There was different wallpaper on every wall. On my bedroom wall there was a lovely very faded Chinoiserie print, full of Chinamen doing strange things. I went on to study Islamic Art and Design at the Royal College of Art, and practiced how to construct patterns according to ancient geometric principles.”

We talk about Grenada and the crossover of Moorish and Christian design in the buildings there, and I track back, wondering how Kate can get so many different patterns into one painting without them clashing. Is this just because I’m colour-blind?