Ken was a great painter, a wonderful raconteur, an excellent salesman, and an inspiration to us all. While he was a workaholic, he was generous with his time and always happy to give advice like “Don’t join anything.”
Of course, Ken was a member of the RA and the NEAC ... and the ROI ... and the RWA ... and the RBSA, RBA, RWS, two guilds and the Chelsea Arts Club.
This church is full of people who loved Ken. Many of you are artists. Some of you were taught by Ken at Harrow School of Art or studied with him at The Royal College, or maybe you would know him as a fellow member of a society or simply a fellow artist.
When Ken opened a door, he did not close it behind him. He would put a wedge in it and invite his friends in. Many of my colleagues knew Ken long before I did and those he admired and wanted to help, he would introduce to David Wolfers, launching their careers at the New Grafton Gallery. When Ken sat on selection panels for the RA Summer Exhibition or the NEAC or Lynn Painter-Stainers, he would tell us all to only send our best work in. And for those glimpses in our careers, we got our works hung on those hallowed walls.
I see many artists here in the church who will have painted alongside him and visited him in his studio for pearls of wisdom, and perhaps some of that famous pasta from Dora. They have all expressed how influential he was in their careers. He would attend private views and often buy our paintings. His and Dora’s walls in London, Cornwall and Venice are adorned with paintings by us all.
Coming from humble origins, his one ambition was to make a living out of painting. It was his passion for painting, his diligence and his remarkable talent for drawing, for tone, for colour, and for simply seeing and showing, that revealed to us the beauty in Neasden sidings, the graffiti on a Belfast wall, the stained Portland stone of a city building, the muddy water of the Thames, and – of course – those studio interiors, Cornish beaches and Venetian views, dripping with light for which he was so well known.
Adopting Sickert’s “Just show you notice,” he saw the possibilities in a shop window reflection and in the wet glistening York paving stone in front of the Royal Exchange.
I first met Ken on my election to the NEAC in 1998. He would have been about 66 then. That year, Ken had taken on the Presidency of the Club, much to the delight of the committee and membership. He was a whirlwind. In the five years he was President of the NEAC, he raised huge funds for the Club, as indeed he did for many charities. He acquired numerous prizes for our annual exhibitions which in those years saw record sales yet to be beaten.
He commissioned and saw through the publication of the wonderful ‘A History of the New English’ by Kenneth McConkey and, of course, hosted that magical candlelit dinner in his South Bolton Studio for the then Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. Dora was away at the time. As Diney Calvert (the closest we have in the Club to royalty) read us the riot act on how to address royalty, Ken was visibly relieved that his vivacious wife would not be there. For if she was, he feared she would sit on the Prince’s knee, tickle his chin, and say ‘Ciao Carlo!”
Ken was a remarkable communicator. Humble enough and confident enough to address all on equal terms. He could address a room, bringing a tear to the eye of the most hardened of bankers, and in the next minute have us all clutching our sides in raptures of laughter. He had so many stories which he told so well … so many times. We all have our favourites. Mine is the remarkable story of the Raw Umber mine in Cyprus (p218 of ‘Light and Dark’, Ken’s autobiography). He was a joy to be with. When he told you a ‘confidence’, he would grab your forearm, lift his top lip and wrinkle his nose. Stabbing his finger at Tate Modern as we passed it one evening walking along the South Bank, he admitted, ‘You know. I’ve never actually been in there.”
He had a great sense of humour and was wonderfully self-deprecating. He appeared thick-skinned – perhaps too long in the tooth – when I knew him to worry what the critics said. He would say, “It’s when they are not talking about you that you need to worry!” He seemed to love the attention – good or bad – constantly quoting Brian Sewell’s sobriquet for him: “That Botticelli of the back-lit Barbie”. We know him more affectionately by the nickname John Maloney gave him one drunken afternoon after a Critics’ Lunch: “High Street Ken”.
Ken was confident but never arrogant. He believed the world owed him nothing, and spoke with pride of showing for 32 years before being elected to the RA, of which he was so proud. He said, ‘We all know where we stand in the art world.” When Richard Green decided to double his prices overnight, Ken raised an eyebrow until he saw what Richard was selling Seago’s for. “Well OK. I’m better than him,” he said. He is.
Ken had so many friends. I would like to mention them all: his fellow artists, his dealers with whom he had such great relationships, his clients – all of whom became his friends, his students, and so on, but it is too many … which says it all.
Coming from a loving home, Ken had so much love to give in his marriages to Annie, Chrissy, and, of course, his beloved Dora. Many of you will know Annie and have known Chrissie but I have only known ‘My Dory” and ‘My Kenny’. They were an unrivalled team. She took care of him so well and he loved her to bits even when she took the bottle of red wine from him!
I have always painted in his shadow. I will always look up to him. Although he is gone, we will continue to be swept along in his wake for years. We were lucky to have had him.
by Peter Brown PNEAC
To read more tributes to Ken from his fellow NEAC members, read our tribute article.
Header image: 'The Riva degli Schiavoni' (oil on canvas), courtesy of Manya Igel Fine Arts, London / Bridgeman Images