Ken Howard OBE Hon RBA PPNEAC RA ROI (1932 - 2022)
Ken Howard: Credit: Royal Academy of Arts
“Drawing is the basis of everything. All the way through the painting you must be questioning the drawing, right up to the very end. Otherwise you get the drawing right and fill it in with colour. As long as you get the effect you want, that’s the important thing. You can use a piece of rag, a sable brush, a hog hair brush or a knife – it doesn’t matter what. Paint what you see, not what you know. What you know is not surprising and is very seldom true.” – Ken Howard
Ken Howard studied at Hornsey School of Art from 1949 to 1953. He then did his National Service with the Royal Marines before returning to study at the Royal College of Art from 1955 to 1958. He went on to win a British Council Scholarship to Florence from 1958 to 1959. For Ken Howard, painting was about three things: revelation, communication and celebration. By revelation, he meant giving people a way of seeing, revealing the world around them in a way they have never seen before – opening their eyes. By communication he meant that his art talks about the world with a personal language, speaking directly to the spectators in an instantly recognisable style. He wanted Art to celebrate life, whether it be human dignity expressed by Velasquez or Cezanne, or the wonders of nature expressed by Corot or Monet. Light was Ken’s main inspiration, and it is through light that he wanted to celebrate his world.
When Ken was in Cornwall, he painted Monday to Saturday, with a model coming in every morning. To him, “painting [was] very seldom an easy thing to do.” He brilliantly described how the creation process unfolds through the day, for an artist: “At the start of the day you are full of belief in the thing you are going to do. If you’ve had a really bad day, the last thing you want to do is get up and work, but if you’ve got a model knocking on the door at ten to seven, you’ve got to get up, and you’ve got to start work again. As soon as you’ve got a brush in your hand… After about ten minutes you’ve got belief again and you think, ‘Yes, it may not have worked yesterday but it’s going to work today’.”
Howard was elected a member of the New English Art Club in 1962, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 1966, the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours in 1979, the Royal West of England Academy 1981, Honorary Member of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1988, Royal Academician in 1991 and President of the New English Art Club in 1998. Among his numerous awards are First Prize in the Lord Mayor’s Art Award in 1966, a Prize Winner in the John Moores Exhibition, Liverpool in 1978, first prize in the Hunting Group Awards and the Critics Prize at Sparkasse Karlsruhe in 1985.
