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 profundi 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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“Crucifixion is a known event, Resurrection its extension beyond knowing and tangibility. Painting cannot pass through these boundaries. I turn, therefore, to myth, to verticality. The dead man on the cross and the double death of Christian belief is passion, compulsion, obsession, an addiction essential to life. All that counters it is perceived to be subversive: Fighting, repression, erasure, destruction, numbness, paralysis. But when these are acknowledged, welcomed, accepted, they are the very roots of creation.’‘The Dionysian transformation. From the cult of light, good and obedience comes the repressed Eros, heralding wildness, drunkenness and the abandon of the returning god of fertility, the god of union and life that cannot be denied. The dark body of the crucified; the darkness of an unseen face, and of the robe, moving in the wind. The ground is white: a warm, white, emptiness. The figure stands head to foot beyond the frame, stepping 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 (1924–2002)