Though I am a figurative painter the objects and shapes that inhabit my work present as colour or shape or viscosity. In that plastic sense it doesn’t much matter what else they are, though saying that I love titles and often there are stories there too. They can happen either way round, either because they’ll insinuate themselves as part of the subject matter, or because they’re insinuated to solve a technical or a formal problem.  I’m interested also in space and lack, and painting nothing. 

‘There are different things at different times that are important to me about a painting, but it is always more than a representation of a thing. Peculiarly, I sometimes think, it usually is about a thing. Why aren’t I an abstract painter? I can’t answer that question without too many words. I can say though that there’s a narrow space, a cusp, between figuration and abstraction which I like to inhabit. I feel at home there. I like ambiguity. What’s important to me about a figurative painting isn’t ever that it should be a perfect representation of its subject. If it were that, what would be wrong with a photograph, or the thing itself? Paint is stuff and you paint on a surface that can be of many sorts. I like painting that contains evidence of this process, leaving it accessible and allowing space for a delve into its making.

‘Painting and maybe more especially drawing (because it is often quicker, and in a particular location) has a diaristic quality, unsummoned by you it is just there. You remember so much of the occasion of drawing or making that is irrelevant to the process, the intention or the result. I don’t know if it matters that this is invisible and unimportant to a viewer of the work.’ 

From an early age in my existence as “an artist” I worried about inconsistency. Many years later I understood that my preoccupations seemed to be cyclical, or always reappeared that was interesting and now I understand that my work is responsive, responding to circumstance or place or invitation or opportunity. Now, many years later, consistency isn’t such a valued commodity, anyway.. So 

Kitty Reford has a degree in Fine Art from Canterbury College of Art, an MA in painting from the Royal Academy Schools and an MA in printmaking from Camberwell College of Art. She has, in the past and recently, regularly shown in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair and The Discerning Eye, as well as being included regularly in the International Open Print Exhibition at Bankside Gallery and various ‘Masters’ exhibitions including The Masters: Etching, and The Masters: Screen and Stone. She regularly shows at Bankside Gallery with the LOOP collective of Printmakers. Other recent shows include Down the Line at the Anna Lovely Gallery, London, Animal, Vegetable & Mineral at The Art Station, Saxmundham and Common or Garden at The Jugg Art Foundation, Ipswich. She has taught for many years in Further and Higher Education, 

• 2005 – MA Printmaking, Camberwell College of Art, London 
• 1981 – MA Painting, Royal Academy of Arts, London Group exhibitions 
• 2005 – Blueprint, Museum Man & Berliner Kunstmuseum, Liverpool/ Berlin 
• 2005 – Clifford Chance, Postgraduate Printmaking in London, Clifford Chance Building, Canary Wharf 
• 2003 – Seeing by Wireless, Electric Cinema (and local venues), Hastings 
• 1994 – Whitechapel Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London Educational experience – tertiary 
• 2005 – FE teaching painting, drawing, print, Epping Forest College, Debden, Essex