Catherine Leyreloup

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made

“A young vivacious and articulate painter and photographer”

(J.Kennedy Melling – journalist and critic Meridian Line Magazine), August 1996.


Born Nice, France, to writer/University professor, she moved to Canada before the family moved to her mother’s native England, which she now makes her home. All these countries have influenced her work. She studied life drawing and photography at Goldsmith’s College, University of London and then a BA Hons at the University of Reading. She twice studied at the Cyprus School of Art, in1989 and 2004.


In 1996 she was nominated to become a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts at the beginning of her career and in 1998 she was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Catherine has exhibited in numerous galleries, solo and group shows including the Kenulf Gallery, London (in aid of the Save the Children fund), and the Fry Gallery together with Sir Terry Frost, John Bellany and Mary Fedden; also at the prestigious Fosse Gallery, and the Highgate and Heifer Galleries, London.


Monet, Van Gogh ,Bonnard and Howard Hodgkin have influenced her work. Her paintings have sold all over the globe from Hong Kong to South Africa, Switzerland, Germany, France, Cyprus and the United Kingdom, to private collectors, company boardrooms, hospitals, hotels and through commissions. She has also undertaken assignments as a visiting artist. Her art is considered an excellent investment, too, because of her burgeoning status.


“Catherine is a phenomenon - she paints with her soul, when you see her work what you get is not just a representation of a scene or a photograph of a person or a place, you get a part of her, you feel that all her emotions have gone into the creation of the picture, it is alive in the way that she is alive, sometimes vivacious, perhaps humorous, or maybe sometimes more sombre and serious, or perhaps revelling in the beauty that she sees, a beauty that most of us are blind to. She can see beauty and colour in the simplest of things, and she captures the moment in a very personal way. To benefit from seeing the world through her eyes is a privilege not to be missed.”


“Catherine’s new paintings communicate her sense of joy and are evocative in their visual excitement. They both retain her freshness of original inspiration and are an exciting reference to their natural source. They are unashamedly beautiful.”
(Art Lecturer, Goldsmiths College, University of London). February 2000


All her work is characterised by a bright vibrancy, a joie de vivre, making it many an exhibition-visitor’s favourite. Catherine is very much an artist whose star is on the ascendant.