The Love and the Pain
Solo exhibition by Catherine Anholt
21 August - 25 September 2026
Catherine Anholt walks by a river in the misty mountains of Galway. Apart from the ragged
sheep and occasional Connemara pony, there is not another soul in that timeless
landscape, where emerald fields and peat bogs tumble towards the ragged coastline of
the Wild Atlantic Way. In one hand, she carries a brightly coloured canvas bag, filled with
sketchbooks, pens, crayons and paints. She rests for a while near a stone bridge and
begins to draw. Despite the beauty of this place, there is a heavy sadness in her heart.
It's springtime, and the reason Catherine is revisiting her ancestral home is because she
is grieving the unimaginable loss of our beloved daughter, Maddy Anholt, an actor, writer,
comedian, twin sister, and new mother, who left this world at the age of thirty-five. Only
this vast spiritual landscape seems large and empty enough to accommodate the
immensity of that loss.
This show is entitled The Love and the Pain, and the work arises from those dappled
emotions - the beauty of nature, the love of family, and the agony of bereavement. The
loss of a child of any age may feel unbearable, but there is nothing depressing about
Catherine's work. The activity of painting is a lifeline, through which she has relearned joy,
and developed an ongoing dialogue with her daughter.
Although she has lived most of her life across the water in England, Catherine's roots are
here in the West of Ireland - home to innumerable artists, poets and musicians. The mist-
wreathed landscape is in her blood, and in the richly coloured work which fills her studio.
Like many of their generation, Catherine's parents Dan Hogarty and Diane Kelly emigrated
to England in the 1950s, seeking new opportunities. Her mother was a night nurse, and
her father a potter. Catherine grew up as the middle child of eight siblings in a rambling,
low-ceilinged cottage, which was in fact three small cottages knocked into one, on
another hilly landscape near Stroud in Gloucestershire.
Those early years would be unimaginable to children today - no phones, no TV, no central
heating, no car, and a long trek to school each day. From the earliest age, little Catherine
was expected to wash, cook, iron and carry out a multitude of tasks. Being a sensitive
child, she escaped the noisy chaos of family life by taking herself on long solitary walks
through the Slad Valley, carrying whatever artist's materials she could find. This is how
she discovered the lifeline of art - alone in nature she was free to connect with her inner
dreamworld. Sitting under a tree, writing or scribbling away, she acquired a lifelong habit
of filling notebooks with her swirling, multicoloured thoughts. In her studio today, there
are numerous shelves stacked with these visual diaries, each notebook swollen with
watercolour sketches, poems and ideas.
As a teenager, Catherine briefly followed her mother and older sister into nursing but
soon realised that she would only find happiness as an artist. She took an Art Foundation
course in Oxford and that is where I met her at 18 years of age - a dreamy blue-eyed girl
with a bag full of sketchbooks. Although we came from very different backgrounds (her
DNA 98% from Galway, mine a peculiar mix of Dutch, English and Persian) we connected
instantly - two penniless dreamers in search of a creative life.
In 1977 we hitchhiked to Cornwall, to study at the extraordinary Falmouth School of Art -
back then a hothouse of creative experimentation for just 200 students. Catherine settled
into the Printmaking department, where she quickly established a reputation as a unique
and fiercely hardworking artist. Qualifying with a First-Class Honours Degree, she
accepted a place on the MA course at the Royal College of Art in London, where she was
offered the Rome Scholarship.
Our first daughter, Claire arrived in 1984, followed three years later by twins, Tom and
Maddy. Searching for a way to use our creativity to support our children, we stumbled into
the world of children's publishing, and for the next twenty-five years, we worked side by
side, writing and illustrating more than 200 picture books, which were sold in many
languages around the world. These were golden years for our family. The beauty of
children's books is that we were able to combine creativity, business and family life in one
harmonious whole. We bought and renovated a wonderful tumbledown house on a hill
overlooking the sea near Lyme Regis in the southwest of England, where we settled into
a happy creative life with our children.
Alongside being a mother to three - and later a grandmother to five, Catherine continued
her daily practice of documenting everyday life in visual diaries. There is rarely a day in
which she has not put that work ethic into practice. For Catherine, painting is an essential
ritual- a meditation, but also a joyful place of play and refuge from the chaos of the world.
She has the unusual habit of listening to the same piece of music - often Bach or Pergolesi
- over and over again until she slips into an almost hypnotic state; slowly building layer
on layer to create flowing, autumn-coloured oil paintings, which are the antithesis of AI-
generated images - these are stories of the soul, and histories of the heart.
Our eldest daughter, Claire went on to study anthropology at Cambridge, taking up a
senior position at the UN, where she focussed on the effects of climate change. Tom
Anholt followed his parents to Art School and is today one of the leading young painters
in Berlin. His twin sister, Maddy, was an olive-skinned beauty with relentless positivity,
energy and humour. Having studied Drama, she went on to appear in numerous radio and
TV shows, published articles and books, taught masterclasses and surrounded herself
with creative friends of every age, race and religion. In retrospect, it was as if she lived her
life at double speed.
In 2022, Maddy gave birth to her first child - an extraordinarily happy and free-spirited girl
named Opal. Maddy was the perfect mother and although she became ill shortly after the
birth, she channelled unlimited love into her daughter.
When we received the devastating news that Maddy had developed an incurable brain
tumour, our lives were changed forever. After many weeks of devoted nursing, Maddy died
peacefully in our arms on 13th September 2023.
The loss of a loved one is a reminder of impermanence. We cannot hold on to a single
thing. We are only custodians in the flowing river of life.
After our daughter died, I witnessed one of the most courageous and defiant acts I have
ever seen, and a testament to the healing power of art - Catherine set up her studio in the
very room in which Maddy had died - a small annexe in the garden of our home. When we
had removed the bed and medical equipment, we painted the walls and laid a new oak
floor. Then Catherine set a canvas on her easel, and with quiet determination she began
to paint, pouring her grief and love into her work, often writing letters and poems directly
into the canvas.
This is not a one-way dialogue - in a magical way Maddy continues to inspire and fortify
her mother. In recent years, Catherine's paintings have become infinitely stronger,
stranger and more beautiful. She has been approached by numerous magazines and
collectors from all over the world, and her work has been exhibited in sold-out shows
from London to Seoul. Now in her late sixties, she has developed an unapologetic
defiance - if people respond to her universal story of love and pain, that is a great joy. If
they do not, it does not trouble her.
In her work and in her dreams, Catherine walks by the flowing rivers of Galway. I would
compare her art to working class visionaries like William Blake, maverick Irish artists like
Jack Yeats and indomitable feminist artists like Frida Kahlo, who used their fierce spirit to
overcome and channel adversity. But we have lived and worked together for nearly fifty
years, and I know she would hate that kind of talk. For Catherine, the work is reward
enough. What gives her joy is the beauty of the natural world and to see her five
grandchildren grow and thrive in this sad, joyful, dappled world.
Exhibition text by Laurence Anholt