Pamela Kay NEAC – Exhibition 2019

Wednesday January 2, 2019

A student of Canterbury College of Art and a graduate of the Royal College of Art, Pamela worked as a Free-lance Textile Designer and Artist. Winning Design Awards and Travel Scholarships, she produced designs for the leading Companies in the sixties and seventies – Libertys, and John Lewis in particular.

Although it had been a delight to see people buying, wearing her designs and seeing them used on television, designers have a short shelf life.

The logical next step, an appointment as Head of the Production Design Department at John Lewis made her realise that Textile design was not the path she wished to take in the future and she declined the post in order to paint full time – risky, but the right decision.

Pamela Kay - Rose Alberic Barbiere And The Floris Bag — Rose Alberic Barbiere And The Floris Bag

What followed were constant requests for work for exhibitions, offers to write for Art magazines, two books, illustration work and a DVD showing her painting methods.

Her work was accepted annually for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and she shows regularly with the New English Art Club in London. Pamela was given a one woman retrospective show in the Canterbury Museum as Festival Artist and another at the Royal Watercolour Societys gallery at Bankside, London.

Pamela’s work is in Royal collections and collections abroad.

Pamela Kay - The Grand Allee, Giverny — The Grand Allee, Giverny

Flowers, Still Life, interiors and Gardens have been her main subject matter over a lifetime. Portrait painting has been confined to her family.

Schooled from her student days in figurative painting, Pamela works from intense observation of her subject matter. This demands a focussed and continuous concentration and an awareness of the historical antecedents of these timeless disciplines.

A study of Dutch, Spanish and French Still Life painting took her to museums all over Europe and gave an informed grounding to subsequent work.

“A lifetime of painting is a rare privilege. It is one continuous stream of observing, learning and discovery. It may include a few meanders and the occasional backwater, but these come with a purpose and always feed back into the main channel, often with the unexpected help of very special people.

The Fosse Gallery has generously given me this opportunity to continue painting. As the late John Ward, my mentor, portrait painter and Royal Academician once said, ‘Every exhibition that sells work, buys me time to paint for the next one’

There is a silent magic in ordinary things that is often overlooked but makes up the life around us. My greatest enjoyment is to show how we are surrounded by humble objects, whether it is a jam jar of buttercups or a copper pan spilling over with succulent strawberries or a river of nasturtiums running down the Grand Allee, and that all these things are wonderful.

I am enormously grateful to Sharon Wheaton and the Fosse Gallery for showing these paintings to you”.