Artists – K

Kelly was a New Zealand born painter, stage designer, graphic designer, interior designer and illustrator who lived in the UK from 1935. During World War II he served in the Royal Air Force as a navigating officer. He began to paint seriously in his spare time, his work influenced by the Surrealists and with a Romantic feel while always meticulously executed. He abandons nature’s topography and reinvents landscapes in a dreamlike world and his interest in architecture is often apparent in his paintings. His first one-man show was at the Lefevre Gallery in 1943, and its success led to another exhibition the following year, when pictures by Lucien Freud and Julian Trevelyan were shown in next door rooms. That year he received a commission to illustrate the art historian and critic Herbert Read’s ‘The Green Child’. Read was an early admirer of Kelly’s work and introduced him to a number of significant clients. The artist exhibited at Arthur Tooth from 1965-1974 and thereafter at Partridge Fine Art. Kelly was commissioned to paint murals and interior decoration in many of England’s most important houses, his good looks and charm fuelling his social popularity. At Castle Howard he executed four murals for the Garden Hall in 1982 and the ‘Kelly car’, a fairground-style train to take visitors around the grounds. His work enjoyed global acclaim, notably in the United States and as far away as Nepal where he decorated a room in the Royal Palace, Kathmandu. He also worked on developing architectural ideas, notably at Henbury Hall where he gothicised ‘The Cave’ for Sebastian de Ferranti and Highgrove where he refaced the Victorian facades and designed new plastered and pedimented frontispieces, returning the house to a more Georgian appearance for the Prince of Wales. He also painted murals in a number of Union Castle and Cunard liners. His work is included in the collections of Tate, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums, Southampton City Museum, Grosvenor Museum, Chester, Sheffield Museums and the National Trust. The R.W. Norton Art Foundation in Louisiana has a holding of his work and his archive is in the collection of the Museum of New Zealand.

Laura Knight was one of the most important female artists of her generation, a Realist painter who documented life and culture in Britain in the first half of 20th century. Born in Nottingham, she moved to Staithes on the Yorkshire coast and then to Lamorna in Cornwall. In London after WWI she drew and painted the ballet, theatre and circus, subjects she found enduringly fascinating. A war artist during WWII she recorded the contribution made by women to the war effort. In 1936 Laura Knight was the first woman to be elected to full membership of the Royal Academy since its foundation in 1768. She battled against the structural inequalities of the art world throughout her professional life, from when she was excluded from the life room at Nottingham School of Art in 1891. In 1922 she wrote a pamphlet entitled Can Women Succeed as Artists where she identified inequality of opportunity as a major factor in the near exclusion of women from the arts in Britain. In 1937, she became the first woman to join the selection committee of the R.A. but was not invited to its annual banquet until 1967. Knight campaigned for greater recognition and status for women in the arts throughout her career and was President of the Society of Women Artists from 1932-1968. Throughout her life she took the opportunity to promote herself and her work, fight for equal renumeration and obtain high-profile commissions. Additional Information Imperial War Museum Art UK Wikipedia