Biography – page 1
Introduction
Keith Grant is now 79 years old and as productive as he has always been. He is admired by his fellow painters and sought out by curators who have purchased his works for the National Galleries of New Zealand, Australia, Guyana and Iceland, and nearer home for the Victoria and Albert Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum, British Council, Contemporary Art Society and Imperial College collections. His numerous London exhibitions have been with such prestigious galleries as The New Art Centre, Roland Browse and Delbanco, Browse and Darby, Crane Kalman, Gillian Jason, and Cadogan Contemporary, and he is represented in numerous other galleries in Britain and abroad. In short, here is a major artist who is still making innovative and important paintings, but whose oeuvre is not available to his many admirers in book form. This is a proposal to put that right.
childhood
After a harshly formative childhood in Liverpool he left school at thirteen to work in the local Co-op and it was only during National Service in the RAF that he was given an opportunity to practise as a painter. After classes in The Working Men's College, Camden which enabled him to enroll at Willesden School of Art in 1952, he moved on to postgraduate work at the Royal College during 1955-8. His fellow students such as Boshier, Hockney, Tilson and Blake were rattling the establishment with their Pop Art, but Grant had already encountered the works of Turner and Samuel Palmer and felt the influence of the English Neo-Romantic painters and so stood by his profound belief in the centrality of landscape painting. Later he would discover Rothko and Mark Tobey and respond to their new ways of handling space.
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Dr Malcolm Yorke is the designated author, a specialist in modern British landscape painting.
His previous books have dealt with the work and lives of Eric Gill, the English Neo-Romantics, Keith Vaughan, Matthew Smith, Mervyn Peake, Edward Bawden and Edward Ardizzone.
December 2006