Trained as a figurative artist, Katrina Bovill established herself in London as a portraitist, which remains the central focus of her art, and on which her first solo exhibition, in 1996, concentrated. Since then, she has continued to develop her interest in the observation of nature and form. After a year spent between St. Ives and Florence, when she painted a series of landscapes of the Cornish and Tuscan countrysides, she worked on a group of still lifes, employing the careful observation of texture, shape and light learned from portraiture and landscape.

Ranging from full-length formal works to more intimate sketches and studies, Katrina’s portraiture remains based on the fundamental appreciation of figure and strength of draughtsmanship acquired in her training, combined with an understanding of light and colour afforded by her experience in other genres.

Her second exhibition, in 1999, consisted primarily of examples of those two aspects of her work; however, it also included a small number of figure studies that revealed her growing interest in the type of genre painting represented by her most recent exhibition, Vietnam, in which she also explored the compositional opportunities offered by large-scale canvases, of which the central group of works consisted.