Otomys is delighted to announce representation of Kate McKenzie Lewis. We sat down with Kate to get to know one another!
Otomys: How did your recent time travelling through Europe feed back into your practice? Did being away from the landscapes you usually paint change the way you're seeing or working now that you're home?
Kate McKenzie Lewis: With some distance from my studio, I am able to return to my work with clearer vision; I can see what was working… and what wasn't. Like most artists, I get locked in and can experience tunnel-visioned when I'm working. I often have to play tricks on myself to draw my attention away from my paintings in order to see things more clearly or with fresher eyes. I want to paint and mark-make with intention. I want to blur the lines between dreams and reality, to reveal the atmosphere of a moment. I want to share the outside world along with my inside world in an attempt to instigate a sense of protectiveness and love.
When I am lucky enough to spend time abroad I am reminded of how I hope to portray a landscape. I am always painting, drawing and taking notes whilst I travel. I enjoy leaving my familiar landscapes to gain a broader sense of perspective and of course take note of how our environments differ or how artists are responding to their environments elsewhere.
Above all, I adore trees, so the dramatic forests, vibrant, comparably lush colours of European mountains and trees are extremely intoxicating to me. I am drawn to European approaches to the application of paint, light and movement. I have always loved the modern masters. I find this very relevant as my own interests evolve; I hope to reveal my own memories moving through my landscapes, both real and imagined. I approach my landscapes with the sensibilities, palette and context of the Australian bush I know so well. I think the places or moments that I represent are personal to me, but I hope, in a way, they are placeless, occupying a nondescript quality through the information I choose to share, highlight or remove.
I am interested in the environmental conservation and contexts my work intersects with, but I hope there is a sense of freedom and familiarity in my scenes that anyone from anywhere can relate and project their own memories onto. Perhaps thinking of their own places and memories they hold dear.
Otomys: You often explore layering and the shifting light across your environments. How do you decide when a painting has reached its "resolved" state, especially when your visual language itself keeps evolving?
Kate McKenzie Lewis: That's the age-old question, I suppose. I love to paint 'alla prima', or in one sitting / wet-on-wet, which - now that I think about it - might be just as much about setting a boundary for myself as it is a technical preference.
Many of my paintings might take a week or so to get quite right, but I am hesitant to 're-enter' a painting once it's dry. I have a lot of incomplete or overworked paintings that have succumbed to this. I love to reveal some of the base coat or metal beneath a painting, and if I am overdoing it, this is often missing. If I have a basic plan for a painting's composition and if I can find some sense of distance from a work to really examine or pause whilst I work, then I am able to stop and see sense.
Some say that a painting will often tell you when it's finished, but you just have to be willing to listen. I think my paintings and visual language continue to evolve because I am always working and thinking and looking at painting; it is my preferred method of communication or language. I am often finishing a painting, knowing how I'd change it or do it again and find myself trying it again, and again. I am using less paint these days, for environmental reasons and also in an attempt to say or share more with less.
Otomys: Do you approach each painting with a planned palette, or does colour tend to take on a will of its own once you're in the work?
Kate McKenzie Lewis: I try very hard to restrict my palette. I usually start with only a few colours on my palette. But you only really need four or so colours to make almost every colour, so whilst I am mixing and painting, things usually go awry. Colour is mostly an instinctive process for me; I think my moods and emotions always take over and reveal themselves in my paintings. I suppose in this I am trying to reveal more of a personal sense of a place rather than the reality.
Otomys: What's one element of your practice that's shifted over the course of this year; something about how you're working, seeing, or thinking that looks different now compared to where you started?
Kate McKenzie Lewis: Something I am thinking about more and more is definitely how to illustrate light and saying more with less; less paint, less detail, more feeling, more revealing. What makes a painting interesting or successful to me is the brushstrokes. I love to study a painting and see how a simple mark or gesture can really make a painting or reveal a clever detail. I hope to continue to use my paintings and materials to share from the outside world. When I was working in residence at the Shepparton Art Museum, I began piecing together sheets of aluminium, like a puzzle to build a bigger picture. I want to make more of these and see where they go. I often find that the gathering of information, time spent outside, drawing, thinking and preparing a surface is the biggest part of the process; the painting part is the final and almost smallest piece of the puzzle.
Otomys: Landscapes can be subjective, often tied up in nostalgia and personal memory. Do you think that plays a part in how you paint? Are you painting the place itself, or something closer to how it felt to be there?
Kate McKenzie Lewis: I think my paintings are revealing of my inner world, as well as my own memories with place. I hope that in the personal they are relatable or nostalgic to the eyes of the beholder. I want to explore the realities of my own landscapes and the unique places they hold in my life. I want to share my love for the outdoors, the beauty, the darkness, the season cycle, loss and the evolution of an experience or how a memory might distort over time, in an attempt to paint the essence of the emotions of time spent somewhere.
I hope to create paintings that people find strange or beautiful and that they might remind them of something or somewhere significant to them. The tapestry of my personal experiences makes up my paintings, whether it's from my childhood spent in the bush behind my parents' place in Jervis Bay or my adult years on the rugged and open coast of the Mornington Peninsula.
My emotions and memories are always tied up in how my landscapes reveal themselves. I hope to reveal the hazy and unreliable nature of my memories, how many things can be true at once. Sometimes we idolise things from our memories that look different when you look back. I am always thinking about how places shift and evolve when I return to my subjects. Sometimes I am sad to find a tree knocked down or pleased to see less rubbish than I remembered. I have early memories of my grandfather telling me to pack my bags whilst a blood sun hangs low, obstructed by the smoky skies from nearby bushfires; I remember my sister falling from a great fig tree; and my mother yelling at me to come in from the water when she saw a large shark brush by me. These memories are warm adventures in the eyes of a child outside and poignant from my adult perspective. I hope to share my memories and possibly reveal something different in the viewer. Whether it's the sun bleeding through low-hanging branches, morning mist or last light. All of these can be true in a single painting; there is no right answer to a feeling.
