Yorkshire is captured on canvas by an artist who travelled north, reports CHARLES HUTCHINSON.

KATE LYCETT’S paintings have an immediate impact. Take the “nice gentleman”, as she calls him, who bought Kate’s study of Ripley Castle at her October show at Chantry House Gallery in Ripley, near Harrogate.

“He told me, quite proudly, that he had lived in his house for 40 years and had never had any ornaments or pictures on display, until he’d found my work,” she says. “Now he has three of my pieces.”

The next chance to acquire work by this artist will come at the annual Art In The Priory exhibition at The Priory Barn, Syningthwaite, near Wetherby, from January 17 to 19.

This comes after a year when Kate’s two most prominent shows were at the Heart Gallery in the West Yorkshire artistic hub of Hebden Bridge in the spring and at Chantry House, a well established North Yorkshire village gallery under the new ownership of Emma Hargreaves this autumn.

Kate first moved to Yorkshire from Sussex to study fine art and English literature at York St John University from 1995 to 1998 and has remained in the north, now living in Hebden Bridge with her husband and three children, Hattie, aged seven, and twins Robin and Daisy, two.

Yorkshire’s landscape fascinates her, not least the contrasts between west and north in God’s Own Country.

“There are huge differences in the trees, for example,” says Kate. “North Yorkshire trees are grander and more solitary. Those in West Yorkshire seem to grow up like weeds. It’s more scrubby woodland than grand old oaks, which I’m sure has a lot to do with the industrial landscape of the west.

“As the valleys aren’t as steep, the bodies of water move slower in the north of the county and I’ve found myself studying reflections. The paintings I did for the Ripley exhibition were full of reflections; the possibility for pattern and flowing lines is endless.

“In contrast, Hebden Bridge is perhaps testament to the power and unpredictability of the water. Less a muse, and more a wrecking ball. Perhaps the main differences are that in North Yorkshire I found the patterns in the trees and water; in West Yorkshire, I found them in the architecture.”

Picking out her favourite pieces from the two collections, Kate says: “From the West Yorkshire paintings I would say Bridge Lanes and Stoodley Pike. The former is very colourful and couldn’t be anywhere other than my home town, while the latter is of the bleak and beautiful West Yorkshire ‘tops’.

“Of the North Yorkshire paintings, it would be Bolton Abbey and Ripley Castle. It’s the deep still water and the grand trees in those that I love.”

Kate, whose background in textiles influences the patterns in her landscape art, begins each piece by sketching and photographing outside on location, before taking her drawings back to the studio to transform into paintings.

“I also take notes on colours while I’m out, as photographs never capture them as I see them,” she says.

Kate loves some of the subsequent paintings so much that she “really doesn’t want to let go”, but she acknowledges she must do so. “It’s lovely to see them go to lovely people.” she says. “My response to the landscape is very personal, and it’s wonderful when that interpretation evokes a personal response in others.

“The painting of Bolton Abbey sold to a lady who had fond memories of time spent with her dad there. She was quite tearful when she bought it.

“The Bridge Lanes painting sold to a buyer in the States, who came over to the UK to collect it in the summer, when I walked her and her husband – who had met in West Yorkshire back in the Eighties – to the place the drawings were taken from.”

Where next in Yorkshire might Kate like to paint?

“I haven’t decided just yet but I’d like to paint more of the Dales and I’d like to paint York. I lived there as a student and it’s one of my favourite places. I would love to paint more of the coast too. Perhaps a family holiday to the seaside is in order,” she says.

In the meantime, she will be exhibiting alongside six other artists plus a selection of ceramicists at the Priory Arts show. She anticipates showing works of the White Horse at Kilburn, perhaps Rievaulx Abbey and certainly the Deer Park at Fountains Abbey, where she was struck by the sound of the clashing stags in the rutting season.

“It kind of makes your teeth hurt; that bone-on-bone sound,” she says.

Looking ahead, Kate will hold another show at the Heart Gallery in spring 2015, and before then she has “a concrete plan for 2014 but it doesn’t have a concrete place yet”.

“It’s a project about lost houses or more specifically West Yorkshire’s lost houses, either gone altogether or in ruins,” she says.

“I had this idea, years ago, for a project that I’d love to concentrate on next year. It started with someone telling me about Castle Carr and New Cragg Hall. Both were grand mill owners’ houses that stood for a very short space of time. There was a vast amount of ‘new money’ in my area of Yorkshire at the height of the industrial revolution, when these crazy ‘brass castles’ went up and then decayed when the textile industry went into decline.”

Many were destroyed by fire or were pulled down in the 1940s and 1950s.

“There are some records, a few photos, architectural plans hidden away in archives,” Kate says. “I’d love to paint some of them as they were, incorporating some of their history and uncovering the mysteries surrounding them.

“Very little is known about some of the buildings so I want to make sure I know what’s there and fill in the gaps, when they have stories connected with them or a feeling about them, like Castle Carr has.”

Kate is not yet sure what form the exhibition will take or where it might end up. “Perhaps I will paint it all next year and then exhibit in the next,” she says. “I’ve only decided on four buildings so far, and I would say it’s not so much a commercial venture as a bit of an obsession, but it’ll definitely be heavy on the heritage. Everyone loves a ruin.”

• Kate Lycett is exhibiting at the Art In The Priory exhibition at The Priory Barn, Syningthwaite, near Wetherby, from January 17 to 19, 10am to 4pm each day