TALK BY KEN PAINE AT RICHMOND ART SOCIETY

RICHMOND ART SOCIETY MEETING - MARCH 10
Link http://www.richmondartsociety.com



The evening promised to be "An Evening with our President". I had met Ken Paine at the London Art Fair exhibition last month, in Covent Garden, and I got the impression he has a friendly, scruffy, extrovert and humorous personality. After the talk and demonstration he gave last night, I still think this. He was born in the 1920s and has spent a lot of time working and travelling in New York and Europe.
The paintings which he brought were roughs in acrylic, worked with large brushes, some so worn that they had the rather wild appearance of Ken's hair, and he also used chalks over the acrylic. Portraits are his thing, and judging from his books, they are,in the main, male heads.
The demonstration was great, as he started off with a very indistinct image on a coloured sheet of paper, and then got the audience to talk about what they could see there. Afterward he worked up the image with his big scratchy paint strokes until it was more distinct, a man leaning on his hand, for instance, with a shirt, and flower in his button hole.
He emphasized that imagination is the most important thing when viewing a picture. That and the darks and lights. I wish I had had a notebook to jot down a few ideas, because some of the things he said were very interested.