Imogen Lycett Green meets ‘witch-mother’ Kate Montgomery

Kate Montgomery lives in a narrow tall house in one of those colourful Brighton streets sloping down to the blue sea that feel like the stuff of make-believe. There is a silver-fox knocker on the purple front door – knock, knock, knock – and it is Kate’s husband, a tall thin poet, who answers, then backs away into the tiny garden, a shadow, hardly introducing himself. Kate, with her long dark hair, black top and tights and black skirt dotted with blood-red roses steps forward.
Her story goes like this.
Once upon a time, there were two little girls who lived in a village called Horspath with a mother and father who were both teachers. The father, a historian, was a Quaker who covered the walls of their 1920s house in wallpaper. Art Deco and Victorian, floral and striped, there were patterns going this way and patterns going that way. He was a frugal man, and when a hole appeared, or the paper peeled off, he would paper it over with the remnants of a different roll, so the patterns didn’t always match but overlapped in an interesting way. The two sisters weren’t allowed to watch television and when they weren’t lost in Shotover Woods or staring out of the window at night at the factory lights of Cowley on the outskirts of Oxford or dreaming of the bigger faraway city of London, which they had read about – for they read a lot of books – they watched the patterns.
So far, so feral. Of course one girl grew up to be an artist, and her sister a writer. Kate Montgomery attended a primary school where the Liverpudlian headmaster Mr Sherman decided creativity was to be celebrated. “We hardly did any schoolwork, just read and painted and wrote stories and I danced and danced.” The little girl wanted to be a choreographer, but her ambitious parents wanted her to study at Oxford University. Like a Chekhov heroine in a country dacha dreaming of Moscow, Kate yearned for London. “But my parents said ‘NO!’” Perhaps because they hadn’t been to Oxford, and didn’t teach there as they hoped they might have, they wanted their daughter to study there. “I obeyed,” says Kate, shaking her head, disbelieving now of her own obedience. But she did get her way when she decided to study art. “They would have had me read PPE and join the Labour Party.”

Meanwhile, she dreamed herself up an alternative identity, making her own clothes and becoming a Goth, in look and sensibility: “Black eye make-up and a pale face, I listened to Siouxsie and the Banshees. It was a powerful subculture, music and fashion intertwined.” She applied to study at the Ruskin School of Art, but you have to join a college, so she chose St John’s because the lead singer of the Sisters of Mercy had been there.
In panelled rooms in the ancient college she and her Gothic persona flourished, going on to study an MA at the Royal College of Art and then to teach. She always painted, first on furniture and then on canvas, but only in snatched moments between teaching Art & Design History – at St. Martins, The Royal Drawing School and Brighton University – because she had to earn a living and her children needed time and money and there was never enough of either.
“Perhaps my paintings are so tiny and so focused because they had to be,” says Kate. She painted them in any corner, each painting taking about three weeks to complete. Now though, finally, she has a room of her own – “space at last” –which she is keen to show me. She is, by her own admission, “a compulsive sketchbook person”, who brings her studies of people on the train back to the studio, inserting figures into her paintings. We climb and climb and climb up the wooden stairs meeting one tiny floor after another and I’m surprised as I peer into the rooms to see the house is plain, unadorned. Kate says: “My husband hates wallpaper.” At the top we reach a tiny former bedroom no more than five feet square, full of art books – Islamic painting, reproductions of versions of the Book of Hours (illustrated medieval prayer books) – and her paintings on boards propped up against the wall.

Now here is colour. The force of the paintings, though mostly only 18 inches by 20 inches, makes me gasp. I remember the intake of breath now as I write this up at home. In the paintings there are patterns overlaying patterns, secret gardens and locked rooms, isolated figures, mostly female, jewel colours –emerald, ruby red, sapphire blue, turquoise – and many windows. Tiny and decorative as these paintings are, why are they so forceful? Is it the colour or the form? I’m not sure. What are they even painted in? “Caseine, which is a milk-based paint, painted on birch panels,” explains Kate. Caseine is a mixture of dried milk, ammonia and glue, which is then mixed with powdered pigment. At the Royal College of Art Kate discovered such traditional materials. This ancient paint was used to decorate Egyptian mummy cases, it is that stable. Indelible
Bringing up three girls while teaching at university, Kate was forced to paint at night, with only the cat for company. There is a night magic about her scenes, a bit Where the Wild Things Are, a bit William Morris, and then a whole rich seam of Islamic painting, which informs the ‘non-illusionistic’ pattern. The use of this ‘flat’ pattern stems from a moment in the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 when instead of painting illusionistic (ie. 3D) pattern like the French, in fabric and painting, there was a tendency to make patterns ‘flat’. “This was nationalistic,” explains Kate, “as in ‘Don’t be like the French’, but also seen as harking back to a superior design intelligence from the Middle Ages.” It was picked up again in the 20th century by textile designers such as Enid Marx, she explains. William Morris did both – his Acanthus is illusionistic, his Strawberry Thief not.
It feels like I’m in a cultural studies lecture. This is so interesting. Kate apologises – I taught for so many years, she says, I can’t get out of the habit. No, continue, I say!
“I enjoy complexity and visual identity.” She asks me if I’m familiar with British designer Thomas Heatherwick’s theory of pattern – that we are hardwired to interpret visual complexity since the days when human beings had to examine landscape – woodland, vegetation – and check for predators or game. Of course all the patterns we find in art and fabric are found in nature first. Heatherwick – architect of London’s ditched Garden Bridge project – champions ‘biophilia’, the idea that we need to be in contact with nature to remain healthy. In Kate’s paintings, the natural world emerges in gardens and patterns. But in the ‘flat’ style, where emotion is suppressed. “I like that art dances along the top of human concerns,” says Kate. “There’s an equality to it – and in me – a wish to provide myself and other people with the visual pleasure of colour and pattern.”
I don’t buy this. These paintings are not just about visual pleasure. For sure, Kate has an intellectual relationship with colour and form which she is still exploring: she cites Uccello, most famous for attempting to reconcile the essentially decorative late
Gothic with early Renaissance realism. But there’s something else at play here. Her work – which has been described as ‘complex, contrary and unavoidable’ –has also been said to both ‘suggest and withhold narrative’. Everyone who writes about Kate’s work identifies tension. Is this where the power of her paintings lies?
While Kate is authoritative, teacherly, there is a feline absence in her presence, a kind of ‘catch me if you can’ disappearance that happens while you are talking to her. I look at her paintings now, as I write. There is the same ‘absence’. There are girls looking away, two women held together, in relation to each other, but not in conversation. They turn away. The few men are tortured, black and white, relegated to also-rans. Montgomery cites Edouard Vuillard, Gwen John, Shani Rys James and Paula Rego as influences. I can see all these painters in her work. But there is something more that is entirely her. I stare and stare at the patterns her paintings make, trying to understand what it is that renders them so powerful.

As we talk, I get this sense that we lived the same childhood at the same time. I too was a feral child in fields, I experienced power cuts in the 1970s and fear of nuclear war, was restricted in my telly watching (a liberal, arty, seventies thing). I too escaped to friends’ houses to watch Hawaii Five-O and Starsky & Hutch Punk, the New Romantics, these Kate and I experienced at the same time. We read the Magical Realists from South America – Márquez, Allende, Vargas Llosa – when they were first published in English, in the 1980s. Magical Realism informed my point of view, and Kate Montgomery’s too. We are both comfortable in a world where black cats and butterflies talk, where a baby comes out of a woman. What is more real and magical than childbirth?
Of Kate’s three daughters, are any Goths? No, she tells me. They don’t get it. Life, and fashion is homogenous now. One is still studying but two are already qualified psychologists. Two psychologists in one family! “It’s in our DNA,” says Kate, resigned to the fact. “My grandfather was an eminent psychiatrist called Harold Palmer, who did valuable work on PTSD after the Second World War. My mother’s father,” she says. “So there was always this sense of habitual watching, of behaviours being analysed. Any visitors were pathologized, their motives deduced. There was no escaping it. Roleplay was not approved of – the Quaker thing is in there too. Wanting to wear make-up or assume another identity was ‘problematic’ and ‘self-indulgent’.”
Now, looking hard, I can see this denial in her work. I will not be read, these characters are saying. I will suggest a story, then I will take it away. You may think I’m thinking this, but you’ll never know. I will not give you what you want There is a metaphorical hand held up, a kind of STOP sign. And finally, I understand their power for me.
Kate makes boundaries with her work. These paintings withhold intimacy in a way that I recognise. It may not be the same for you. When we connect with a painter, we see ourselves in their work. Same goes for novels and music. When a piece of art reflects back to us who we are, we value it. The same could be said for relationships. In a good, intimate relationship, your partner holds up a mirror in which you see yourself, and a connection is built. Without that reflection you do not know who you are and you must make yourself up. When Kate says, “If I’m not doing [my work], I’m in mourning for myself” I begin to understand just how important it has been for her to paint and keep painting, in a room of her own.
When she and her sister were children, the artist had two grandmothers living nearby who told her stories, made up ones and recognisable ones from the Brothers Grimm. The characters and motifs of fairy tales are simple and archetypal: princesses; dragons, and trolls; wicked stepmothers; fairy godmothers and other magical helpers, often talking horses, or foxes, or birds. When I ask Kate Montgomery which fairy-tale archetype she identifies with, she is amused by the question. Then she describes how when she was artist in residence at Glyndebourne she was asked to respond to the1893 Märchenoper (fairy-tale opera) Hansel & Gretel by Engelbert Humperdinck (the German composer not the British pop singer who pinched his name). I imagine the trail of breadcrumbs, the cottage in the woods. “Witch-mother,” she chortles, her eyes full of mischief. As she says it, the cat arches its back, wrapping itself around her tightly crossed legs. I’m in cahoots, says the cat. Or did it? After two hours in thrall to Kate Montgomery, I almost believe it talked.

Kate Montgomery is represented by Long and Ryle (longandryle.com) and Sarah O’Kane Contemporary Fine Art (sarahokane.co.uk) See Autumn Highlights on page 16 of ROSA Issue 10 for details of her exhibition.
Imogen Lycett Green is an arts journalist and curator of kids’ poetry projects, including Betjeman Poetry Prize and Track Record