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.”

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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.

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Kenneth Loynes