Press Release – Catherine Harvey-Jefferson

Catherine makes work fuelled by her experience of place and journeying through the landscape both by land and sea. Walking through remote and extraordinary places, Catherine makes plein air drawings that lead to exhuberantly colourful paintings or etchings. Mark making is key to processes that evoke and create an emotional response and physical connection to nature and mother Earth.

Catherine Harvey-Jefferson is a third generation painter from the Harvey Family in Cornwall and studied at Falmouth and Winchester Schools of Art. She is based in Penwith with a print studio in Penzance and a studio near St Just in Cornwall. She is a member of Newlyn Society of Artists, and regularly shows in London. Catherine is a qualified skipper and sailing is a huge part of her life and much of her work is about journeying through marine landscapes.

Colour is key to Catherine’s painting practice  – as is drawing. These two things come together in an intimate embrace in her painting. Her most recent series of works, both painting and etchings are made from her experience of Travelling and tramping in New Zealand. Her etchings taken from drawings made crossing the Cook Strait and entering the Sounds are a sailor’s view of crossing a small treacherous strip of sea dividing the islands.

The Cook Strait, is a narrow, notorious stretch of water between North and South Island New Zealand between Wellington and Picton. Catherine describes her experience as a ‘continuous state of drawing mania catching all the intense rock strewn shapes and making sense of the navigation marks and channels.

Catherine’s trip to New Zealand was a long awaited experience connecting her to her artist mother . A long held yearning to explore a country that she had read about and heard about from her Godfather , listening to his tales of tramping when he lived with the Harvey  family on board their Victorian steam ship Norian.  A kind of pilgrimage. …visiting some of the places her mother  and God father had been before her. A powerfull experience sitting in the same spot at the same age at  Franz Joseph Glacier, time concertinered.

The testing walk into the Copeland Track, breaking down fears , traversing wire swaying bridges and becoming part of the enchanted landscape that she walked through. The crossing of boulder fields with the glacial blue river churning , all elements moving , commanded by water, the magical glades and miniscule plant life under vast trees, gold particles in soloution in the streams,  birds commenting above .

Back home in her studio on the edge of the Penwith Moors Catherine developed these drawings into large exuberant and colourful paintings that expressively capture the experience of passage through that landscape. Her further exploration of form through etchings have led to the creation of small boxes bursting with a series of beautiful and delicate etchings.

Crossing this narrow strait is a journey across the sea and a connection between two distinct countries, it  is metaphor for life and the emotional journeys we all experience. Catherine’s paintings are expressive cartographies of place and our relationship to it but also through it, creating a bridge between and meaningful connection to elemental nature and emotion.

The series of paintings ‘A Journey ‘can be seen on her website http://www.catherineharveyjefferson.com