The artist: Kenneth Loynes: Biographical note.

 

Born in Birmingham, England, 9th December 1924.

Parents separated shortly after. Sent to foster-parents.

Attended village Blue-coat school; no further education.

 

Widely travelled. Survivor of the Second World War generation and, in all the years since, a witness to some of the violent conflicts and failures of vision which have scarred the post-war centuries. So far as a life-time in painting has taught the artist one durable meaning it is this: that art remains among the few, free ways in which a society can, through the power of imagination, recognise and recreate itself.

 

Probed deeply into art to know its meaning in a time of anxiety. Came to understand that art has no meaning separate from the act and end of its making. In this regard art touches myth. And like myth its content comes de profundis from the psyche.

 

Affiliated to no school, style or movement he has kept an individual path, his works much valued by private collectors in Europe, Africa, the far East.

 

Kenneth Loynes died 12th March 2002.

 

 

The following extract is from a review of an exhibition of Kenneth’s works.

 

Kenneth Loynes is a powerful and emotional painter. Using Acrylic, he has a fluid and highly individual technique, sparing of pigment, which gives a deceptive look of immediacy, as if the work has been confidently achieved in a comparatively short time. This mastery is the result of a long struggle, both with life, and the unending search for honesty in his chosen method of making his statement about the world, in which he identifies with the victims of many adverse circumstances. Freda Wadsworth.

 

 

 

Concerning the artist’s work and purpose

 

Art and life are one question; this is immediately so in the paintings of Kenneth Loynes.

 

Taken together this inseparable dialogue produces a body of work that rests just on its visual impact. Matters of style are incidental never imposed.

 

A Normandy battleground implicated with the revelation of Nazi barbarism gave his work a lasting imperative; tone not colour, contrasted and conflicting dark and light. Whatever in experience is torn, opposed, unclear of meaning has found a place in the works and are the essence of their content.

 

So also, compassion, a realisation forced by the violent deaths of young men under fire.

 

Loynes works in series. These have included the last days of white rule in South Africa, a country he knows on the ground. Another on the Nazis. A further set from the Bacchae of Euripides. And STALINGRAD; the men, the battle, the meaning and its still-present consequences.

 

The major, larger number of paintings average in size 95 by 70cms, supported by smaller drawings and studies.

 

The matter of influences on a self-taught painter is not easy to determine. Many and few. In a final count, Goya. Affinities without influence would include the early 20th century Expressionists, something of de Kooning; a regard for Francis Bacon; distantly, Cezanne, analytic cubism. From literature and drama Samuel Beckett. In philosophy Heraclitus: “Nothing is more real than, nothing.”

​

True knowledge is an expansion into things unknown. Knowledge has no fixed temporal dimension. It cannot be used to stabilize any form or state, including the state of understanding that this cannot be.

In recognition art can be approached in two ways; as continuous temporal change, a matter of style, or as content. Horizontal or vertical. Vertical responds to the condition in-itself, its a temporality. Horizontal remains with the phenomenon. Mine is the first of the ways, an approach largely outside the contemporary frame and not 'seen'.

Yet the seeing capacity of people unaffected by a current aesthetic is broader, the plain eye. The informed eye glances aside, the uninitiated eye looks straight. Not with certainty, but with a certain wonder and a hint of the fear that all visualized images bring. The plain eye is corrupted by mass imagery by contrast it sees when an image has depth in content.

Mass imagery has no intrinsic force and cannot of itself be corrupt. Its corrupting affect is its temp-orality, its repetition and replication. The vertical image breaks this horizontal surface.

There is no art without form and no form without content. Art cannot be authentic for its time. Its strength is opposition to a time. I have an approach but not a language, content but not form, the trunk but not the branches. Each painting gropes content to form, form to content, using whatever intimations might bring about a synthesis. I turn often to myth for the vertical significance it has.

Tone then becomes critical. Figures and actions come by dark and light in collision, by force-lines to hold the directions of mass within the defining plane, by subtle losses throughout. Depth is reached by form drawn from content. Subject-matter is no more than enabling. If I title a series of works 'From the Bacchae of Euripides' motif only is intended.

The vicar of a local church asks for a painting of the Resurrection, sequel to a Crucifixion I did for the church some years ago. Interpretation is left to me, now as then.

For the vicar and his congregation the subject-matter is conceptual. For me no more than enabling. It has its specifics. I take these as defines together with given size and spatial limits, the picture plane and its four edges.

Crucifixion is a known event in the tangible world. Resurrection an extension beyond knowing and tangibility. Painting cannot go beyond. I turn to myth, verticality. What resurrects from the dead man on the cross and from the double death of christian belief is a passion, a compulsion they erase, destroy. Numb, paralyze. Acknowledged, welcomed, accepted they are the root of creation.

Dionysic transformation. From the cult of light, good and obedience, the repressed Eros, wildness, drunkenness and abandon of the returning god of fertility. The denied god of union and life. Dark body of the crucified, the dark of an unseen face, and of the robe, moving in a wind, the ground white, a warm white emptiness, the figure head to foot beyond the frame, into the space of the church.

This will not be a rejectable image.

Don't do what you think is right. It isn't.

​

Kenneth Loynes

 

                                                                              Kenneth Loynes 1924-2002

 

 

 

Nietzsche stated the necessary connection between suffering and art when he said “What must this people have suffered that they might become thus beautiful”

 

Kenneth Loynes was such. He died on the 12th of March 2002.

 

He kept an old battered Chinese alarm clock, long since stopped, eleven twenty-eight. He many a time tried to get it working, winding, tapping, throwing it into the wall followed by “blast this wretched thing! but the hands of the clock never moved

 

We sat around his hospital bed, as we had done for the past three weeks. A big ward, cancer ward.

We knew exactly where Kenneth was. The only bed with curtains drawn all around.

 

He used to complain – very unusual for him – the complaint was however, how every morning the

nurses would chirpally throw all the curtains back and expose him to the world.

 

He hated that. The curtains were now the only solace to his mind. They were ordinary pastel

coloured with some kind of pattern. How Kenneth – but he did – they came to him, conversed, eased his pain when no-one else was with him, all of them, Marx, Freud, Beckett, Goya, too many to name, they all came out of the curtains. Spoke to him.

 

There he was. Getting more and more weak and thin. The doctors said, there might be a chance if he would only take nourishment. By then he had enough. He did not want any more.

They stopped the drip feed, as Kenneth would pull the plastic pipe out. One of the doctors said he looked like an old testament prophet. How true. The skin pulled tightly around the cranium of his head. Eyes wide staring into something we no longer a part of. His long white wavy hair spread like a halo around his pillow. His white beard -

 

So vain Kenneth, so charmingly vain. Such a gentleman. Not that he was well bred or of so called good social standing – for that meaning of the word he was to the contrary. But by mark of politeness, courtesy, generousity, kindness, charm, the word gentleman fitted none better.

 

The vanity innocent. Concerned with his looks due to the dignity of his appearance. Only cold water tap in his tiny stone cottage. No indoor toilet or shower or bath. He heated a small pot of water on his gas stove. Filled his Belfast kitchen sink with cold water, and added the hot water and groomed himself carefully. No heating in the kitchen. Hair neatly combed back in a long pony-tail that would be tucked into his woolen hat as he went over to his studio.

 

His clothes would be tainted with paint from wiping the brush – first on a cloth then – for what ever reason – onto his trousers.

 

His studio – always complaining of it being too small, it restricted him from really large sizes, the largest painting six feet by six feet.

 

He built the studio himself after returning from South-Africa. His wife South-African. He met her during the 1970ies. He was publishing -with a few friends- an underground political paper: HAPS. All hand printed. Several hundred copies sent to underground groups all over the world, also South-Africa. His wife, a white South-African, was accused of communist sympathy. She wanted to leave for England, but could not get a Visa as coming from the Apartheid South-Africa. She wrote to Kenneth for advice after getting his name from the underground paper. He wrote back; “The only way for a visa is for me to marry you, I am prepared to, to help you get out”. And so they were married. Purely on trust. Seven years it lasted, one of which they cycled to India, with her youngest daughter on the back plus a tent. It took them a year. From London, through Europe, The middle East through Afghanistan to India.

 

The years of marriage are rather vague regarding the painting. Not much, as he worked to support his family. Mainly as a gardener. After two years in England, his wife wanted to return to South Africa, could not stand the damp any longer. They settled in a rented farm in the Transvaal. Grew organic, to be self-supportive, and make a living by selling in the local market. Happy times for Kenneth. Until the letter from the Immigration Police came. He was not granted permission to stay, even if married to a South African, even if self-sufficient financially. So he was forced to leave the country. The black clouds returned. The cold, the damp, but necessary for his art to flourish. His wife that he took on trust decided to return to her first husband. He never saw her after that.

 

On his return to England, he again spiraled down into a black hole, like he did when he was invalided out of the army, after Normandy, aged only nineteen.

 

The blackness, the suffering, the nothingness – until the realization for him that ; “meaning is the continuous struggle of creation out of nothing and returning to nothing “. Kenneth used to quote Heraclitus;” nothing is more real than nothing”.

 

He would stand every morning in front of an empty canvas, or an empty white board, and from this white nothing, he would be in a creative process, a form almost of ecstasy, where time and space was no longer – when he returned or awoke of this creative process, he would be utterly exhausted and in a sense returning to nothing, from a state of creative excarnation – at one with all – and back to life in the present form of Kenneth Loynes.

 

Kenneth rarely in the later years signed his paintings other than with an L and the date and the year on the back, as if in the process of creating, he was not sure weather it was the present Loynes or some eternal force that worked through him. When a painting was done - he didn't use the word finished- he often was not immediately able to understand them. He would take a newly created board to his tiny room and live with it, in the night, look, dwell, read, find the meaning in the interplay of light and dark.

 

He would never explain a painting. In finding your own way, your own path, your own understanding, the viewer incorporated into the work, actively participating in the creative process itself.

Enigmatic forms are living forms, like life, an iridescence an invitation to the dance. No satisfying interpretation, nothing to rest in, nothing to weigh us down.

Meaning as a continuous creation out of nothing and returning to nothingness. Alive, pulsating -

 

Not long to go. Kenneth gone already, his body still here.

 

We have to move you the nurses said, and the bed with Kenneth's body rolled in to a small, darkish room, curtains closed. The hours went by. Afternoon turned to evening. A friend came, sat for five minutes “this is Michael Kenneth, I've come to say goodbye”

 

Kenneth was here and he wasn't here. Heart still beating, as it had the last three days, only heart still moving nothing else, Kenneth gone – where? not far, not yet.

 

Mesmerized we watched the last pulse of life. Moving gently, caressing his old body, into his throat, slowly beating, up and out through his open mouth – gone. So dignified, in death as in life.

 

For whatever reason I looked at my watch. Evening, eleven twenty-eight.

 

 

Margrete Geurts-Lakin

 

 

 

 

 

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