Linda Kitson’s iPad City: New Digital Prints of London and Cambridge
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Linda Kitson’s new show at The Coningsby Gallery is composed entirely of a new series of digital prints created on the iPad.
Linda Kitson studied at St. Martin’s School of Art and The Royal College of Art. Her first exhibition was of drawings of the wine chateaux of Bordeaux. But the work which first drew significant public attention was when, as Official War Artist, she accompanied the British Task Force to the Falkland Islands.
Subsequent ventures, such as those to Canada and to Thailand, produced suites of drawings that still had an aspect of reportage. Linda Kitson also had successful exhibitions of landscape drawings, generally produced as she describes it, by “clinging to the side of a mountain” in France and Italy.
She has also illustrated for the Folio Society, works by Camus and St. Exupéry. However, domestic circumstances took her for several years out of the country, and eventually, out of her practice.
Her return to England led to a return to art. The drawings for this exhibition started in August 2015, and demonstrate a very dramatic new approach.
Someone who has been, as she describes it, “a line draughtsman all my life”, has embraced the latest technology which allows her to have a wealth of colour at her fingertips. With it she is now exploring ways of depicting the drama of city architecture. “ Drawing in the middle of cities”, she says, “ is a totally new world.” London and Cambridge share many of the same inducements, with the old alongside the very new. “ The iPad changes everything. You can be anywhere, bus stops, traffic jams, building sites. The whole collection of ‘tools’ is in your hands.” With the ceaseless and dramatic demolition and construction, there can never have been a more exciting time to be drawing in towns.
“ It’s as if I’ve only just begun the business of looking at life again, and found so many new ways of describing it.”