Keith Purser

Steps to Water, Woodcut with Hand-Colouring by Keith Purser, 2007

2007

Keith Purser lives and works on the edge of the desert-like environment of Europe's largest shingle bank, in the shadow of Dungeness power station and within sight of the coast of France. Born in Bromley, Kent, he attended Sidcup School of Art in the 1960s. As an artist, he balances two very different approaches to landscape painting: one essentially abstract, the other figurative. As an abstract painter, Purser deconstructs the sea and shore into harmonies of colour, texture and form. These works are as much about painting itself as they are about the shifting weather and changing moods of the coast. As a figurative painter, Purser creates homages to English vernacular art. These paintings of the down-at-heel, resorts and gently rusting harbour towns of the South Coast capture the peculiar charm of these places. These two strands in Purser's work are always meeting, albeit quietly and incidentally. The vernacular often steals into the most abstract of works by way of found objects picked off the beach, whilst Modernist formal sensibility orders the seafront houses into a harmonious arrangement of blocks of colour.