Kate Sherman was born in 1970 and studied Fine Art at Birmingham from 1990-93. For 10 years she worked in London for a large contemporary art gallery, before deciding in 2005 to paint full time. She lives and works near Brighton in Sussex.
Various themes run through much of Sherman’s work - memory, longing, transience; and there are often recurring subjects – blossom, forests and woodland, dwellings, which are sometimes blurred as if seen from a moving vehicle. The imagery originates from photographs she has taken of her surrounding landscape. This photographic source is important because the paintings capture a reflective notion of memory, of the emotional distance between a real landscape and a photograph, between experience and longing. The work has a poignancy that often mediates warm familiarity with a sense of foreboding. There is also a quiet melancholy, reminiscent of Edward Hopper, that is expressed both by the portrayal of sparse unpopulated landscapes containing elemental traces of man, and by the restrained palette suffused in a reserved northern European light.