Growing up in Dubai and returning home to England’s Lake District when she was a teenager gave Kathryn Wilson a new kind of homesickness.
Although she loved being in the beautiful countryside of her native United Kingdom, she missed the lifestyle, the deserts and the wadis of the UAE.
Six years ago, in her mid-20s, Wilson came back to Dubai, where she took up a job as an art teacher in Repton School. The experience was surreal, because the city in which she had spent her formative years had changed so much that she had to relearn it.
The process somehow spurred her creative streak and she began to find her path as an artist.
“When I arrived back in Dubai, it was like coming home, but it was also overwhelming because I knew the place so well but there was so much that was new. I found it inspiring to find my way again and I got hooked on painting and photography specifically during that time.”
Wilson, 32, is now the director of art at Brighton College Abu Dhabi and she is also making a name for herself in the UAE’s art scene.
In 2011, she had her first solo show with the Al Madina Art Gallery in Muscat, Oman. Coffee and Kaleidoscopes was set up in a temporary exhibition space in the city’s Al Oraimi centre. It was made up of many pieces that she had worked on since her return.
“My painting had evolved and I was doing a lot of it and it was very different from anything I’d done before,” she says. “It was really encouraging to see people appreciating it and buying it at that first exhibition.”
Since then, Wilson has been part of group shows in thejamjar, Mojo Gallery and Abu Dhabi Art Hub. Her work can also be seen in public, on the mural wall outside Dubai Ladies Club on Jumeirah Beach Road and in the lobby of Centurion Star Tower in Deira – a commissioned work done in collaboration with Capsule Arts.
Many of her paintings are abstract and filled with vivid colours and, although they are not representational, she explains that they symbolise the natural places that she loved.
“My abstract paintings are like a journey,” she says. “I sit down having no idea what is going to happen and let them evolve. When I’m finished, they really remind me of a place I have visited either in Oman or the UAE – usually deserts, wadis, caves or plateaus – they are not realistic but they are my perception and the result of letting my subconscious go.”
Wilson has also recently started painting waves, something that is a key theme in many of her larger mural works.
She says she is simultaneously fascinated and terrified by the sea and its ferocious power, hence she chooses to paint it. It is also a subject matter that is certainly inspired by the views from her Dubai Marina home studio, which looks out over the water and is the view she contemplates whenever she sits at her easel. “There is a sort of flow to my work, which is because painting for me is a way of letting a creative flow continue.”
It is this release that means that Wilson could never stop painting, and she hopes that the future holds more opportunities for her. “I hope to carry on creating in this way and getting involved in more bespoke work and commissions,” she says. “I would also like to gear myself up for another exhibition in the near future.”
• See more of Kathryn Wilson’s work at www.kathrynwilsonme.com
aseaman@thenational.ae
