Sunshine Only Sometimes
Katie Tomlinson

24 & 25 June, 2023 | Patina Gallery, Antwerp

Katie Tomlinson’s latest solo exhibition, Sunshine Only Sometimes, aims to capture the artist’s impressions of the fizz of anticipation felt at the onset of summer. The idea for the body of work emerged around the spring equinox, and the pivotal moment in the calendar marking a change in the seasons fed into the joyful, ecstatic movements and moments captured in the series. The pieces themselves speak to the simplicity, vibrancy, and energy that the artist feels when anticipating the coming warmer months; assured gestural pastel strokes capture the movement and vivaciousness of al fresco gatherings, the tender bounty of seasonal produce, the sensations of sunlight and warm breezes on bare skin. Vivid azure and deep ochre colours recall the space and light of Mediterranean beaches. Just as Wordsworth detects ‘a thrill of pleasure’ among the birds in Lines Written in Early Spring, so the artist finds in the people around her a collective sense of opening, unfurling, eagerly drinking in the sunlight.

Aptly, music also served as a source of inspiration for the series, which almost hums with rhythms and movement; Katie habitually works with the radio playing, and came across the song that inspired the series’ title while in the studio one day. Like the lyrical pieces themselves, the song features a simple pattern of acoustic guitar chords, easily imagined as the backdrop to a hazy, lazy day in the countryside, which situate the singer’s wistful melancholy at lost love.

Katie’s capturing of the warmer months is delicately inflected by such a melancholy: wreathing the scenes of dancing and summer socialising is the subtle sense that the joy in these moments is felt precisely and more vividly because of their transience.

Without the winter clothes to shake off and the darker nights that lengthen into balmy evenings, there would be no sense of unburdening to inform the freedom felt in the embrace of warm sunlight. Our relation towards the summer months can only be appreciated by the colder months. The concept calls to mind the Japanese idea of mono no aware: ‘a melancholy awareness that everything nice will fade combined with a rich enjoyment of this short-lived beauty’ - cherry blossom being the prime example in Japanese culture. Would the blooms be so appealing if they lasted year-round? Such is the nature of transience: the knowledge that these blissful moments will fade makes them somehow sweeter, more urgent, more necessary to capture and enjoy to the fullest.

And enjoy to the fullest we will! The exhibition has been timed to open shortly after the summer solstice, and promises a sensory feast to capture the fleeting pleasures of this symbolic time of year. In a full embrace of the ethereal joys of summer, Sunshine Only Sometimes invites us to savour, to dream, and to toast to brighter days.

Text by Nikki Tomlinson

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