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New Artist Profiles Webb, Kenneth | Webb, Kenneth |
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Kenneth Webb walked into Kennys in High Street for the first time in 1953, and they have been working together ever since. It has been a very happy working relationship built on mutual trust and great friendship. In the sixty years since, his work has come in different phases. He gets locked on to and explores a particular subject, and when he is finished with it, he moves effortlessly on to a new theme. Art lovers have experienced his Forest of Dean pictures, his County Down farmhouses and harbours, thorn trees, tidewrack, the poppies of the 1960’s, bog paintings, the waterlilies of 80’s and 90’s and his recent images of his unique garden and the Marconi Bog. What has not changed in all those years is his passion for painting and his use of colour. Colour for him is an all embracing experience which pervades his work, and he constantly experiments with his own freer ideas and personal concepts, using direct colour in a subjective expressionist manner. Whatever the topic, his fresh approach to painting, especially in Connemara, makes him one of the most important and influential landscape painters in the country today. Many artists who have achieved something personal in their work have been largely helped by a sense of place. For Kenneth, this place is Connemara, especially near Ballinaboy. It is imbued with a certain spirit he finds inspiring. He enjoys being isolated there and seems to find motivation in every neglected bog cut, every leaf and stone, the uncut grasses and the wonderful variety of colours in his garden. They all demand to be painted. He works in various styles but his internalised vision now takes precedence over any objective representation. John O’Donohue has written “Kenneth Webb’s work is a homage to the secret life of colour. Though his paintings are intense icons, you never have the feeling that form or content are forced or contrived. He has managed to penetrate to some deeper level from which the painting is able to assert the dream of its own shaping. He says paintings have always come to him. His work does have that tone of lyrical necessity; they had to come. In our post-modern era where so much of life is reduced and commercialised through visual and aggressive image, it is healing to the eye, and refreshing for the heart to encounter these paintings. If beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, then Kenneth Webb is a graced and gracious beholder. He is an artist who does not crave praise or success, but a dedicated painter who is constantly driven to bold new experiments in paint. Long may paintings continue to visit his imagination and bless our darkness”.
Selected Career Highlights
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