Katherine Holmes
(b. 1962)
The current Art in the Atrium exhibition will be celebrating artwork by the Yorkshire artists Katherine Holmes and Anna Adams, the exhibition will run from February - May 2026.
Gavaganart, in Lancaster, works with artists from throughout the British Isles with an emphasis on artists from the North of England with many artists based in either Yorkshire, Lancashire or Cumbria.
In partnership with Gavagan Art, Art in the Atrium at Low Wood Bay Resort & Spa provides an accessible, free and informal way of being able to see a display of fine art in the resorts' spacious Atrium.
Katharine Holmes (b. 1962) is best known for her paintings and drawings of her native Yorkshire landscape. A graduate of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, she worked in galleries in Kendal and Glasgow before returning to Yorkshire in 1990.
“Growing up in a multi-generational household I was surrounded by the paintings of my mother and grandmother. My home studio was once my grandmother, Constance Pearson’s. Like Constance, I paint outside in all weathers and return to the shelter of the same studio to work on larger paintings on canvas.”
“I like the simplicity of working with ink, a few brushes, a pen or maybe a stick I’ve picked up to use as a drawing tool.
My paintings are often worked both inside, in the studio, and outside, in the landscape. As I work, the painting takes on a life of its own, evolving into an object with its own unique character. Using rags, brushes and palette knives, the painting emerges as I
build layers and glazes, scraping into the painting I work and rework.
In this way the paintings are like the landscape itself, worked and reworked by stone walls, well-worn tracks, green lanes and the play of light on a metal farm roof. We are both shaped through centuries of human presence.”
Katherine Holmes 2025
The house, High Barn Cottage, in Malham, North Yorkshire, which Katharine returned to, had been home to her mother Philippa, and grandmother Constance Pearson, both artists.
Katharine paints outside in all weathers and currently works from her studio at the Malham cottage where her mother and grandmother lived and painted before her. Beyond home and the familiar Katharine Holmes paints the wilder fringes of Britain and Ireland especially the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and South West Cornwall. She has made a living as an artist since the mid 1990s and has worked in Japan, Greece, Kenya, New England, Italy and throughout the British Isles. Widely exhibited and collected, her work is in many private and corporate collections.
Fascinated by the effects of light, the paintings are as much about atmosphere as they are about the physical features of the landscape. Working in a range of media from ink, watercolour and gouache on paper to oil or acrylic on canvas.
Anna Butt, was born in 1926 in Richmond, Surrey. She studied at Harrow Art School and Hornsey College of Art, where she met her future husband the painter Norman Adams RA.
Anna worked as a designer, a freelance artist and art teacher. Throughout her life she produced paintings and ceramics based on a sensitive and close observation of nature. Many people know Anna for her watercolour paintings of Ribblesdale and her terracotta figurative works of animals and birds. These were mainly produced at Horton-in Ribblesdale, North Yorkshire, Anna and Norman’s family home, close to Pen-y-ghent in the Yorkshire Dales.
A published poet, Anna began to write seriously in both prose and verse in the early1960s. In later years she concentrated on poetry and prose writing.
It is intended that this exhibition will provide an insight into the various aspects of Anna’s creative work.
Thank you to Anna’s son Mr. Ben Adams for all his assistance with this exhibition.
Mary Gavagan, January 2026.
Other artists whose work curated by Gavagan Art, that have had exhibitions as part of the Art in the Atrium gallery.
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