Exhibition news

Now on show is the solo exhibition by the award winning young artist, illustrator and author Catherine Rayner.

Catherine's distinctive animals and birds are brought to life by her vivacious and lively style; her speciality is creating a character using only a few strokes of water colour, ink or pencil. In her new exhibition, she's hoping for a more immersive experience for the viewer. ‘For this exhibition, I've been creating some large silk screen prints of animals, and I've also been playing with printing leaves and plants,' she explains. ‘I'm hoping the exhibition will be a feast for the eyes and you'll feel like you are in the forest with the creatures when you walk around the gallery.'

Balancing both her gallery work and her children's stories is a natural process for the Catherine, as some of her paintings and drawings for exhibition also eventually end up as part of a brand new story.

‘I try to split my time fairly evenly between writing and illustrating children's picture books and creating larger scale one off pieces for exhibitions', she says. ‘I find is very easy to jump between the books and the gallery pieces as they do tend to feed in to each other quite naturally.'

‘I can spend the morning sketching deer, studying their movement and character, whilst trying to create a character of my own to paint from, or turn in to a silk screen print. Then in the afternoon I can be doing exactly the same thing but with a character from one of my books. My one off pieces are really characters in their own stories, I just haven't written the book yet – but I do always leave space on the page for the text to sit… just in case I get around to it one day!

Catherine is a graduate of the Edinburgh College of Art, where she trained as an illustrator. Much of this time she spent watching and sketching the tigers at Edinburgh Zoo, eventually completing her first book ‘Augustus and His Smile' which won her ‘Best New Illustrator Award' in the Book Trust Early Years Awards in 2006, and one of four nominations for the Kate Greenaway prize. Catherine won the prize in 2009 for her book ‘Harris Finds His Feet'. She has published nine picture books to date, to critical acclaim. And with more books and exhibitions on the way, the story certainly doesn't end there for Catherine Rayner.

Click here to read more about Catherine Rayner and view work currently available.

Catherine Rayner

Catherine Rayner

Above: Some of Catherine's previous work; 'Clemence and Melinda', 'Dexter' and 'June'

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