**** (4 stars)
“Absolutely fascinating”
I’m always delighted when I get the opportunity to thank an artist or performer in person for their work, and today was such an opportunity. Ken Currie was in conversation with [retired] art historian Tom Normand. The two have been friends for years, and Tom has been a witness to Ken’s success as an artist right from his early beginnings as a student at Glasgow College of Art. As one of the ‘New Glasgow Boys’ Ken was famous in the art world in a way you might associate with being a member of a boy band today.
Unlike previous Scottish artists, Ken didn’t have to teach to make a living. On the strength of an early exhibition, he was commissioned in 1987 to paint eight panels for the ceiling of Glasgow’s People’s Palace [famous as the home of Billy Connolly’s banana boots]. These paintings clearly demonstrated his interest in Scottish [and particularly Glaswegian] working people and of figurative art as opposed to the abstract styles in fashion at the time, especially among members of the Edinburgh art elite.
In subsequent years a change in Ken Currie’s style and technique began to be visible, with greater luminosity and more universal themes. In 2002 the Scottish National Portrait Gallery [NPG] invited him to paint the portraits of three prominent oncologists – his first ever portrait commission. The resulting painting has become the most popular and most visited painting in the gallery. [It’s one I am constantly drawn to, and I’m feeling the need to see it again asap.] Ken remarked that people’s reaction is almost always “fight or flight” – it’s an extraordinarily compelling work, with the three men appearing almost ghost-like against a dark and potentially menacing background.
It was fascinating listening to Ken talk about how the painting was made. The two surgeons were far too busy to sit for him, so Ken spent hours watching them in the operating theatre. [The third was concerned with research, and equally busy]. All three allowed him to take plaster casts of their faces, so he was able to study how light and shade fell on their faces and incorporate that into his picture.
Later on he talked about a more recent, equally compelling addition to the NPG’s collection, Unknown man, a portrait of anatomist Susan Black, who is pictured with a shrouded cadaver. This was not a formal commission, but painted ‘because he wanted to’. His studio journal at the time, as he tried to make sense of all the things he had seen in the anatomy department in preparation for the work, contained musings about the difference between live bodies in the operating theatre and dead ones in the anatomy department – the latter no longer a living person but a human-shaped object”.
In the Q&A at the end of the session, Ken spoke of being completely incapable of “painting for relaxation”. For him it is a compulsion: through it he releases his inner tension that comes from his concern for and interest in the many crises, political and otherwise, that surround us locally, nationally and globally. He also quoted someone else’s observation that an artist only makes 50% of any work – the other 50% comes from the viewer.
Ken Currie: Paintings and writings is a book that arose out of correspondence between him and Tom Normand and draws extensively on Ken’s studio journals. They show his mindset while working on a painting and is a daily record of his thoughts and comments on what’s going on in the world around him. He never intended them for publication and stopped writing them for some time after the publication of the book. He has now resumed – so maybe one day there will be a Ken Currie #2!
This was an absolutely fascinating hour which will result in a visit to the Portrait Gallery as soon as I can make the time. This was the penultimate session in Luath Press’s ScotlandsFest series – I’m already looking forward to next year!!!
Scotland’s Fest, The Heart of Darkness – Ken Currie, Paintings and Writings, St Columba’s by the Castle (Venue 367) for more information go to: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/scotlandsfest-the-heart-of-darkness-ken-currie-paintings-and-writings
ScotsGay Arts 