Kat Lightfoot - Painter

Two years ago we sold our Devon house. The cob and brick double-fronted terrace with the tiny courtyard was home for five years. When we moved in we lived, slept, worked and cooked in the attic; we could cook whole meals on two electric rings and we did the washing-up in the bath. The builders took over the downstairs, lighting fires on the bare dining room floor to cook their Friday-morning fry-up. Ceilings were ripped down, damp, ancient walls scraped back to dark, muddy stone. I came home from work one day to find they had demolished the kitchen.

The man in Mid Devon District Council’s Community Charge department was surprised when i called him; he thought the building was derelict.

But it eventually all came together. Max patched the wobbly lath and plaster walls we couldn’t afford to replace and Bob hand built a handsome ‘non-fitted’ kitchen.

One day Kat arrived with two large paintings in the back of her Golf. We put the seascape on the living room wall, then replaced it with the calf.

Five feet square, high, wide and handsome, we christened him Lester. He dominated the small, stone-floored, sun-filled room, watching over us as we read, as we occasionally watched TV.

The only thing larger than Lester was the window. We never closed the curtains, we liked to see the year go by, wave to the neighbours, watch the pub-goers as they headed up the hill to the Castle, then down again to the Lion.

For some reason we never got around to putting a number on the door; maybe we knew we were never going to stay.

Jerry the musician sat beneath Lester one Christmas morning, his left hand racing like a frantic tree frog up and down the frets of my partner’s Manouche guitar. The performance was astonishing.

“Nobody knows you as number 12,” he told us, looking up at the canvas. “Everyone calls you ‘the house with the cow’.”

People knocked on the door asking to look at Kat’s calf; parents would sneak a quick look before scolding their children for lingering too long - “don’t you know it’s rude to stare?”

We no longer had to introduce ourselves; we just mentioned Lester and people knew who we were. Later we added a sheep. We called her Celeste and put her in the room where the builders had fried their breakfast.

We sold the ‘house with the cow,’ packing Lester and Celeste away in bubble wrap and sheets of cardboard and parcel tape.

Kat emailed my partner this week asking him to update the gallery on her website.

As I look through the images, I’m reminded of all the reasons why I love her work. Dancing hares, watchful hounds. Gale-lashed, wind-washed ponies painted so vividly, so honestly, that my own memories of the gorse and tors of Dartmoor come back quick and sharp. She makes me feel a longing for that lovely, remote place that is almost too painful to bear.

She sees cattle and calves, lambs and sheep. Not livestock, not beasts. She captures on canvas one, short moment in a life that will end at the hands of the slaughter man. She honours their dignity, their nobility. She records their place in a landscape that only exists because of them.

Soon we will move into our new home, and we will unpack Kat’s work.

Celeste will look at us, stubborn, challenging.

And Lester will be back on the wall; the former barn will become ‘the house with the cow’.

Click here for more information on Kat Lightfoot.