Artist Bio
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Ken (b.1942) spent his first seven years in Milngavie as an evacuee from the Clydebank Blitz. Life in the Glasgow area included career experience in printing, typesetting, graphic design, copywriting and illustration. At 33, Ken founded a typesetting company which later grew to add graphic design and litho printing companies forming a successful Scottish communications group.
His love of art started in childhood with regular weekend visits to the wonderful Kelvingrove Art Gallery where the work of the French impressionists and The Glasgow Boys inspired him to go on to study commercial art and life drawing at Glasgow School of Art. He also studied printing at Stow College Glasgow. He has painted all his life and in 1999 Ken decided to become a full time landscape artist settling in the beautiful east coast university town of St Andrews, Fife, recognised worldwide as the historic Home of Golf.
Ken’s paintings have been exhibited in galleries in Glasgow and St Andrews and he has many collectors throughout the U.K. and USA.
His work has twice been featured in the International Artist Magazine.
Artist Statement
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It rains a wee bit in Scotland! As a young boy I have vivid memories of sitting at my bedroom window, listening to Ravel’s Bolero playing on my older brother’s wind-up gramophone whilst through the raindrops on the glass I tried to find faces in the clouds. To this day, GESTALT plays a invaluable and essential part in my approach to painting.
I have always loved to paint and, like most folks, find it cathartic. My two dimensional canvas, regardless of dimensions, becomes a portal to another world that photography cannot capture. There is a longing to take the viewer with me on my colourful, ethereal journey. Putting paint to canvas is only the shorthand for magical places seen or imagined. On occasions a landscape will happen so quickly it’s almost as if it was on the canvas before I started . . . Always grateful for that. The finished product is only a success for me if it lifts a room and it adds a little pleasure to the life of the viewer.