During lockdown London-based screen printer Nathalie Kingdon produced a collection of work based around the theme of summer, inspired by the South of France where she comes from. Beach scenes, palm trees, swimming pools, swimmers, pine trees, and Matisse-like shapes filled her artworks. She comments; “I was missing the place and people there (the South of France) but I also realised that I took a huge plunge into my childhood and the seventies era”. Nathalie took shelter in her studio and blocked the bad news of the world – and the anxiety related to it – and let the images and motifs of the optimistic seventies era take over.
“It was like giving a place to an aesthetic I was surrounded by as a child that I loved. Fantasy as well: the pink, the bean shape swimming pool, the very beautiful and elegant ladies.”
Nathalie works from her own bespoke studio at Wimbledon Art Studios, where she has been for the past 5 years. Her studio is home to an exposure unit with two UV lights (as her screens are quite large with a 100cm x100cm minimum) and a large printing table. “It is relevant to say that printing in these circumstances leave a fair bit of space to making mistakes and I love embracing these mistakes in the process of printing,” states Nathalie.
Her educational background began outside of the art world as she studied in Aix en Provence with a Masters in French Littérature. She describes; “I come from a background – home and school -where Art was not really taken seriously, unfortunately”. Nathalie only came to the world of art when she moved to NY and started painting with an artist friend. She discovered screen printing much later at the Putney Art school where the screen printing room – “rushed, messy, and hurried as it was” – grasped her interest immediately.
The process itself is definitely what matters the most to Nathalie. As a screen printer, she is not interested in printing the same print over and over, and instead produces very small editions of four or five, with ten being her maximum. Her work is quite graphic, thus a print generally starts with a found image that triggers her imagination. “I generally have a vision of how I would like to use the image, the scale being the first thing I like to change and think of. I like to play on Photoshop with it, mainly to see if I will be able to expose it successfully on screen and understand if what I have in mind would work at a later stage.”
Nathalie’s prints are further inspired by the cinema of the sixties and seventies periods; “My imagination is nourished by some scenes of the movies of la nouvelle vague (Cleo de 5 a 7, Pierrot le fou, Le mepris, la beau douce, l’homme qui aimait les femmes and so many more) and also great directors from the seventies such as Claude Sautet, Alain Cavalier, Claude Lelouch, and mainly by the way these directors filmed women, their movement, gesture, and attitude.”
Currently, her work is focused the representation of women, or more precisely, images that capture a pose or an attitude in women. She says; “I realise now how clear the use of womens’ bodies is in my work, and how fascinated I am by the aesthetic of it. I work quite organically though, and therefore can’t say there is any message I want to deliver, but I would like for my work to tell a story.”
Nathalie is represented by the great Enter Gallery in Brighton, Molasses House in Harpenden, Art Fully Sorted, and Rise Art.
Her next show is The Wimbledon Art fair taking place from Thursday 18th November to Sunday 21st November.
@nathaliekingdon
www.nathaliekingdon.com
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