Kenneth Webb

On Reflection

Kenneth Webb is considered to be one of the finest landscape painters of the last one-hundred years. Over the course of his career, Kenneth’s landscape painting has evolved through several significant phases over his many decades of painting - in terms of both subject and technique, and today he continues to create and innovate through his art. Kenneth has spent his life creating spectacular paintings so that we might share his own individual reaction and impression to the natural world around us. Kenneth’s paintings are an exploration and celebration of the natural world through colour. Experimenting with colour in a free, expressionist manner since his art school years, Kenneth has arrived at a joyous aesthetic that captivates and envelops the viewer. Taking inspiration from the natural landscape around him, from his garden and his studio in Connemara on the west coast of Ireland, his paintings are rooted in place and are deeply personal. From vibrant, attention grabbing poppies to ethereal waterlilies, Kenneth has always sought out the beauty in the natural world that surrounds him. From the south coast of Devon to the rugged landscape of Connemara, Kenneth’s artistic milieu has enabled him to constantly evolve and reimagine his subjects. Despite their range, none of these themes has been entirely isolated or completed; Kenneth continually revisits subjects and techniques, adapting his approach and combining ideas in his eternal quest to truly capture the mood, the emotion - the spiritual essence - of a landscape. Towards the end of the 1950s, Kenneth began to paint landscapes on the long narrow canvases that he has today become so identified with. These landscapes captured the beauty of the Irish countryside in colourful abstracted vistas. His earliest Irish landscapes were of farm buildings in County Down in which Kenneth explored the shapes and tones of buildings in varying degrees of abstraction, often focusing on blocks of colour in geometrical shapes. In February 1963 the Irish Independent wrote; “These low long landscapes in which a smoothly-painted sky of braided pigment, be the mood day or evening, calm or storm, is balanced and held in unity by the impact of impasto among buildings and fields in the narrow foreground.” To be at the top of your game for over 70 years and to be striving to improve and succeeding at the age of 90 illustrates the strength of passion that Kenneth has for his art. We are privileged to be chosen to provide the platform to showcase this exceptional talent.