Catharine Somerville’s paintings are made in difficult colour-acid greens.
However difficult, it is a wonderful piece of painting, providing the spectator with architecture along its bottom third. This serves to situate the viewer at a distance in front of the ‘arches /trees’. Above the safety of this recognizable space the foliage and sky overwhelms one and produces a much more ambiguous space in which it is much more difficult to understand one’s position in respect of the representation contained therein. The colour works. And the dancing highlights and incessant scratches on the surface stitch the plane of the picture together in a way that pulls the various spatial devices into cohesion. It is a difficult picture and one which is a huge achievement upon the very good but not so ambitious work she was making before taking up her post graduate studentship. I think it is a very good painting-a painter’s painting...