WHYTE'S EXCEPTIONAL IRISH ART MONDAY 7 DECEMBER 2020

22 KennethWebb RWA FRSA RUA (b.1927) Born and brought up in England he was called up in 1945 -the last year of WorldWar II - and served in the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy, where his commanding officer was naturalist David Attenborough. His natural ability in how to draw and paint was demonstrated here - he started organising art courses for sailors and airmen. He was demobbed in 1947 and despite winning a scholarship to Slade he preferred to do the National Diploma in Art and Design in Gloucester, which he felt gave him a wider choice of practising art and which is probably accountable for the diversity of his work - from detailed book illustrations to abstract compositions. He exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1949 and at the age of 25 in 1952 he garnered a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts. A few years later, having attained his HDip in Education he got a job as Head of The School of Painting in Ulster College of Art Belfast. Here he worked alongside John Luke, Colin Middleton and Tom Carr By 1954 he was exhibiting at the RHA, IELA, RUA. He started weekend schools for amateur artists, assisted by Maurice Wilks and Gladys Maccabe among others. This would evolve in 1957 into The Irish School of Landscape Painting (ISLP) and include venues, at the invitation of Bord Fáilte, in the Republic. Webb encouraged his students to paint and draw in nature to widen their approach and not just remain fixated in the curriculum of Realist paintings. In 1961, after 7 years teaching at the Ulster College of Art he resigned to take up a full-time career as an artist. In 1973 he bought a cottage in Ballinaboy near Clifden, Co. Galway which became a permanent base for the ISLP and this has offered a multitude of inspiration for his work over the last forty-seven years. Webb has shown his work in numerous venues since the early 1950s and has had biennial solo exhibitions at the Kenny Gallery and the James Gallery, Dublin. He has exhibited with the Cork Arts Society, the Solomon Gallery, Dublin, the Oriel Gallery, Dublin and the Metropolis International Gallery d’Art, Geneva. He has also shown at the Belgrave Gallery, London and the Wren Gallery, Oxford and has also regularly exhibited at the Royal West of England Academy. Webb’s early influences were Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, and the English painters Paul Nash, John Minton, and Graham Sutherland. Ivon Hitchens, whom he knew, was a strong influence as can be seen in many of his works. In September 1959 - reviewing Kenneth Webb’s exhibition at The Hendriks Gallery James White wrote in The Irish Times: ”[This is] a point of departure for the artist who is obviously moving into the realm of abstract expressionism, but he still depicts natural forms even if they are not in the general pictorial statement, rather than exact representations. He continues the tradition of Dan O’Neill and Colin Middleton in investing his world in romantic warmth and conviction which seems curiously absent in the pictures of those Southern Irish painters upon whom the mantle of Jack Yeats has not yet fallen directly. This is an artist of brilliant promise.” James White again: “It might perhaps be true to say that Kenneth Webb has resolved the conflict between figurative and the abstract in the subject matter of his paintings. He has not turned his back on nature, nor failed to take pleasure in the shape of trees or stones on the beach. But their shape means more to him than illustration of forms which combine to make a composition which brings rhythm into a landscape” In 2017, Galdwell & Patterson, held a major retrospective exhibition in London to celebrate the artist’s 90th birthday. Kenny’s in Galway also hosted a major exhibition for him in 2017, and another major retrospective took place at the Royal Dublin Society in 2019. Now aged 93, Webb is as prolific as ever and his work continues to explore creative boundaries.