Kitty - Waiheke Painter
The artist Kitty at work.
Artist Profile: Kitty
This week I visited the artist Kitty who is a successful interior designer and painter who lives on Waiheke Island. Catherine Huckerby paints under the name Kitty, a family pet name that connects her to the family in the UK.
As a child, her mum was very attune to colour and had a mental memory for colour matching. With her 6 children Kitty’s Mum had knitting, paper mache, ceramics and painting projects for the children and handed down her love and understanding of colour. Both parents were very creative, her Dad was an advertising director and her sisters are all creative in their own way. During lock down in 2020, Kitty and her sisters did a paper mache challenge over Zoom with other family members as judges.
Kitty was painting long before going to interior design school in the UK and feels the way someone paints is more about their personality: “What I like about painting is it lets you work with more freedom. With design work you're working with a customer’s brief and you have to be more precise and a bit rigid but my art is quite free, not detailed in an intricate way. Paint moves and changes and splashing paint gives a piece more depth; a free creative exercise that elicits an emotional response.” Kitty feels painting is a way of counteracting a rigidness as creativity works on so many levels.
Catherine says her design background is based around working with colour bases, “Interior design is about layering colours and textures that enhance the space giving them feeling and depth. People have polarising feelings about colour, everyone responds in different ways. In advertising, 90% of people respond to colour first then shape and then lastly the message being put forth by the advertiser.” She teaches part time in the Diploma of Interior Design department at Unitec and teaches students how to use colour to create interior spaces.
Recently, she’s been focusing on the colour green which was good during lockdown as people needed that restful palette and feeling of calm in troubled times. Her work “Drench” is a good example of the transition to a blue palette in her work. She has always been inspired by traveling and now taking more inspiration from the beautiful surrounds of Waiheke. “The light is amazing in New Zealand and colours are really vivid. In the UK there is a lot of grey cloud cover which is beautiful in its own right but New Zealand has this spaciousness about it that inspires and allows your mind to be free.” She is now moving on to a warmer colour palette as we approach Spring and Summer.
