KATE Downie’s paintings capture the dynamism and movement of modern life. Susan Mansfield learns how a year of pandemic confinement inspired her to look in a completely new direction, drawing from nature. ONE particular work by Kate Downie always sticks in my mind. It’s a drawing of a landscape sketched from the window of a train speeding across Fife, done on the back of a cardboard sandwich packet. She didn’t use the sandwich packet for a conceptual reason, it was simply all she had to hand. The sketch was framed and later developed into a painting. That drawing says so much about Downie’s energy and dynamism, her approach to her work. She is almost always in motion. Even while talking to me in her Fife studio, she is often moving around, pulling out things for me to see. She is known as an artist of human movement, a landscape painter of the modern world, of roads and bridges, gasometers and pylons, industry and infrastructure.