press

“This new body of work is on display now in Rutland, and it’s a hero collection. … Longmaid’s style dramatizes the skeletal planes on these faces with light and shadow. Her color choices and brushwork are sharp and strong. The subjects and their portraits have no ambiguity. They look you in the eye. The paintings are the right ones for the turmoil of our times. … Longmaid’s eloquent paintings show the path to courage. We knew it was there somewhere, and Longmaid found it. ” 

– Victoria Crain, Arts Correspondent, The Times Argus & Rutland Herald, Rutland, VT, 2018

“Most pronounced in Longmaid’s paintings are her high-keyed color palette, intense light sources, and bravura brushwork. Akin to the styles of figurative artists such as Alice Neel or Elizabeth Peyton, Longmaid’s manner of painting foregrounds her handwork and the subjective point of view she applies when deciding how to paint each figure.” 

~Kathryn A. Wat, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, “Body of Work: New Perspectives on Figure Painting”, Women in the Arts Summer 2010 (Volume 28, no. 2), a publication of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. 

“In this exhibition, Kate Longmaid gives us a series of psychological portraits that are at once lushly painted and spare. Longmaid’s style is direct, yet nuanced. These paintings begin with the painter’s careful observation of individuals, but go on to narrate the tension between the subject, the artist, and the viewer. … Longmaid gives us portraits of real people: Color and surface yield the utterly particular angles and volumes of each face, which allows us to enjoy both her fluent paintings and her complex subjects.” 

~Amy Rahn, Art Map Burlington, Burlington, VT, 2009 www.artmapburlington.com 

“Given that Kate Longmaid is a psychologist, I find her ability to give a fleeting glance into the personalities of her subjects without even a hint of sentimentality particularly intriguing. With seemingly little effort, each quick, expressive brushstroke records an impression, a penetrating psychological insight, conveying personality with unvarnished realism. Surely her years of studying the human psyche has had a profound effect on her art.” 

~Idoline Duke, Curator of the Vermont Women To Watch 2010 Exhibition, Stowe, VT, 2009 

“Shelburne artist Kate Longmaid’s lively gouaches reduce landscape to its most elemental; her Wolf Kahn-like “Indian Summer, Vermont,” for instance, conveys the warmth, color and earthiness of its subject with horizontal layers of paint – like a striated slice of the countryside itself – and simple, eloquent composition.” 

~Pamela Polston, Seven Days, Burlington, VT 1997 www.7dvt.com