Published 30th Sep 2023, 00:00 BST

The last time Kitty North had an exhibition at Salts Mill in 2017, it was to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the late entrepreneur Jonathan Silver and his family taking over the former textile mill which they transformed into one of the North of England’s most impressive cultural jewels.

Her paintings told the story of Salts Mill from its 19th century origins to the present day, and now she returns with a new exhibition, Continuum, that charts her own artistic journey.

North’s work is inspired by the rural Yorkshire landscape in which she lives and works, and the cavernous gallery is a fitting place to display the big, bold vistas that have become her calling card.

Dales artist Kitty North with her new Salts Mill exhibition 'Continuum' It's got 16 big new artworks which she's been working on for 20 years, Salts Mill. Picture taken by Yorkshire Post Photographer Simon Hulme

At the heart of this retrospective exhibition, which features more than 100 paintings and drawings in oil, acrylic, watercolour and charcoal, are a group of 16 oil paintings that she has worked on over the course of the last 20 years.

These six-foot paintings are a nod to John Constable’s famous ‘six-footers’ – including The Hay Wain and Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows – with which he made his name at the Royal Academy. He, too, was in thrall to the landscape, though for him it was the bucolic Suffolk countryside rather than Yorkshire’s hills and meadows.

North’s colour-soaked canvasses take the viewer into a world of peaks and hamlets, and farmhouses set amidst swirling skies, mesmerising suns and beguiling moons.

Her paintings are a kind of visual love letter to rural Yorkshire life though there’s nothing saccharine about them.

“There’s a very clear start and end to certain images; a response to a particular place, day, moment in nature, capturing the changing weather and seasons. But with these huge oil paintings, it’s completely different. When I stand back and look at them, I can feel the two decades that it took me to create them – the layers of paint, the passage of time, building on the canvas. They have a real weight to them,” she says.

These large oils are the product of what, at times, has been a long and arduous process.

“You make a start and then you get to a point where something’s not quite right so you leave it and then you’re drawn back to it. I think you’ve just got to follow your gut and your instinct with art. It’s about recognising there’s something there to work on so you just keep going," says North.

Kitty North: One of Yorkshire's best known artists talks about her latest exhibition at Salts Mill