"Salts Mill has always been a northern powerhouse of the best kind"

Kitty North can pinpoint exactly when the panic set in. At the start of the year the artist best-known for her work in oils had accepted a commission from Salts Mill in Saltaire. The plan was to create a new series of work to celebrate 30 years since the late entrepreneur Jonathan Silver and his family breathed new life into the then-redundant buildings.

Now home to a series of galleries, it is a big space to fill, but when the family arrived on her doorstep hoping for a first glance at the paintings they hoped would kickstart the anniversary celebrations there was nothing to show.

“I had done a lot of sketches. I had drawers full of scribbles and rough ideas, but I didn’t have one single completed painting,” says Kitty, who cuts a striking figure in the Dales village of Arncliffe where she set up home five years ago. “It took a long time for me to hit my rhythm with this one.

“I was so excited by the commission and I wanted to do something different, something that people might not expect. That’s why I took all the oils out of the studio so that I couldn’t be tempted by them. When you are working on this scale and this quickly, painting with oil is like putting your foot through treacle. I knew what I wanted to achieve, but the journey to get there was a long and difficult one.”

Even up to three months ago, Kitty’s studio attached to her home was embarrassingly bare, but just when she was fearing she may have to call Salts Mill and ask for an extension she had something of a Eureka moment.

“I had looked at so many old photographs and read so much about the place that there came a point when I told myself, ‘Right, Kitty you are just going to have to find a way to make this work.’ A few days later I was back at the mill. It was 5pm and just starting to rain when all of a sudden all these bright young things started pouring out from under the middle archway. And that’s when it all began to fall into place.

“It struck me that Salts Mill has always been a place of creativity, a northern powerhouse of the best kind, and what I had to do through the paintings was show how that passion, that desire to make things better had run through successive generations.”

With the floodgates unlocked and against a soundtrack of opera and Desert Island Discs, Kitty spent much of the next two and a half months in front of a succession of giant canvases. Often working until the early hours, she experimented with colour and form and the result is impressive.

“There isn’t even a street light in Arncliffe, but there I was with the studio lights on at all hours. I hope they are used to me by now, but I do sometimes worry the rest of the village must sometimes think I am quite mad.”

Kitty wanted to work quickly, removing the temptation for agonising deliberation, and two and a half months later she had completed 30 or so paintings, which tell the story of Salts Mill from the 19th century to the present day.

There’s the mill against a fiery bright orange background in the 19th century heyday of Titus Salt; there’s another painting on a black background which shows Jonathan Silver, just after he and his wife Maggie took on the cavernous buildings in the late 1980s, leading his family into a new chapter of their lives; and there is a series which show the place as it is today. The latter have a touch of LS Lowry, had he swapped his trademark browns and greys for a brighter palette.

“For me there are distinct periods to Salts Mill,” says Kitty. “There was the fire of the industrial age, the period when Jonathan and the rest of the Silvers moved in and the present day. For that early period I really wanted to channel a little of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony of London 2012. I thought his tribute to Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel was incredibly powerful and Titus, I think, was cut from that same cloth. I want people to stand in front of these pictures and really feel the heat.

“It’s funny really, when I began this project Titus was a historical figure, but I felt I really got to know him. In fact, there were times when I half imagined he was in the studio with me.”

Look closely and there are also a few more familiar faces in Kitty’s collection, from David Hockney at his easel to Alan Bennett with a cup of tea.

“I always imagine him with a cup of tea, don’t you?” says Kitty. “One of the events I remember most at Salts Mill was an evening with Bennett, Hockney and the poet Tony Harrison. David couldn’t hear a word Alan was saying, so every so often you would hear Tony pipe up in his strongest Yorkshire brogue, ‘David, Alan said…’”

With the paintings now hung and the exhibition open, Kitty hopes people will also notice recurring motifs. The lions which sit outside Victoria Hall in Saltaire are there, so too are the alpacas on which Titus famously built the fortunes of the mill.

“To me the lions also came to represent Titus and Jonathan,” says Kitty, adding that Maggie has occasionally been recast as an alpaca.

“I spent hours down the road at Kilnsey Park where Jamie Roberts has a herd of alpacas – his great-great-grandfather took over Salts Mill 120 odd years ago and everywhere I looked I began to find links with Saltaire. They are really difficult animals to draw. But whenever I struggled with a painting I would go to sleep thinking about it and more often than not I would wake up the next day knowing what to do.”

When the Silvers arrived for a second viewing, Kitty did have something to show and the family couldn’t have been more pleased.

“Before she began to paint for this exhibition, Kitty did a lot of groundwork,” says Maggie and Jonathan’s daughter Zoe Silver.

“I have heard her vent after frustrating days attempting to draw alpacas from life, watched her jaw drop in a jam-packed Saltaire during the festival, and sent her on hikes up Baildon Moor in fast-approaching twilight in search of the perfect view.

“In the last few months it has all come together, filtered through Kitty’s unique artistic hand, eye and heart. The pictures are absolutely beautiful and mean so much to us.”

A few days after we met the collection was due to be shipped to Salts Mill, but even with the clock ticking Kitty was still debating whether a couple of the paintings needed more texture and whether one alpaca was anatomically correct.

“I know I might not sound it, but I am Northern,” she says in an accent that could just about cut glass. “I think everyone from here is born with a grit and determination which means whatever happens you just to get on with things.

“When I got going on this project I couldn’t stop. I would tell myself, ‘Come on, Kitty, don’t think about it, just do it. If you make a mistake it doesn’t matter’. I love these paintings and more than that, it’s a privilege to have played just a small part in the long history of such an iconic and wonderful place.”

Daring to Dream, Salts Mill, to April 15. 01274 531163, saltsmill.org.uk