THE ARTIST: KENNETH LOYNES


Kenneth Loynes was born in Birmingham, England, on the 9th December 1924. His parents separated shortly after, and he was sent to live with foster parents. He attended the village blue coat school, receiving no further education. Widely traveled, a Survivor of the Second World War generation, and, in the 50 years since, a witness to some of the violent conflicts and failures of vision that have scarred the post-war half century; a lifetime in painting has taught the artist one durable meaning: that art remains among the few, free ways in which a society can, through the power of imagination, recognise and recreate itself.


Kenneth Loynes probed deeply into art to know its meaning in a time of anxiety. He came to understand that art has no meaning separate from the act and end of its making; that in this regard art touches myth, and  that, like myth, its content comes - de profundis - from the psyche. Affiliated with no school, style or movement the artist kept an individual path, his works much valued by private collectors in Europe, Africa, and the far East.


Kenneth Loynes died 12th March 2002.



CONCERNING THE ARTIST'S WORK AND PURPOSE


Art and life are one question; this is immediately apparent in the paintings of Kenneth Loynes. This inseparable dialogue produces a body of work that rests primarily on its visual impact. Matters of style are incidental, never imposed. A Normandy battleground implicated with the revelation of Nazi barbarism gave his work a lasting imperative; tone, not colour, contrasted and conflicting dark and light. Whatever in experience is torn, opposed, unclear of meaning has found a place in his work and is the essence of its content.


Equally, compassion; the tragic and violent deaths of young men under fire.


Loynes works in series. These have included the last days of white rule in South Africa, where he lived during the 1980s, another on the Nazis, a further set from the Bacchae of Euripides, and STALINGRAD: the men, the battle, its meaning and its enduring consequences. The paintings average 95 cm by 70 cm in size, and are supported by smaller drawings and studies.


The matter of influences on a self-taught painter is not easy to determine. Many and few. In a final count: Goya. Affinities without influence would include the early 20th century Expressionists, something of de Kooning, a regard for Francis Bacon; distantly, Cezanne and analytic cubism. From literature and drama: Samuel Beckett. In philosophy Heraclitus : "Nothing is more real than nothing."



WHY STALINGRAD?


The following abbreviated extract comes from conversation with the artist:


In Greek myth the Titans were the old gods, their end the beginning of a new world. Stalingrad and its aftermath has been called a battle of Titans. It, too, signaled the end of the old and beginning of the new. For this reason: Stalingrad, a meaning that is apocalyptic.


These paintings were not done to dwell on obscured memory and its somber consequences, however. It is not the past, actual or supposed, but its potential ramifications that are of concern. What can be done to avoid history repeating itself? Not only for our own sakes, but for the sake of the future generations for whom we are responsible. Indeed, the concept of linear time must itself be questioned: time is not and will never be the impassible absolute it once was.


Conscience, memory and courage. We must remember in order to look forward. When memory becomes void that void is filled with artificial memory, not nakedly savage, but ostensibly benign. Science, for instance, a word indicative not only of knowledge but of knowledge with wisdom. When wisdom frays, knowledge grows corrupt by its own power. So it has been since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and, as with all power whose alternative choices are lost, it strives towards totality. We see it dreaming its own redemptive dreams: human life within reach of genetic manipulation. Echoes of Conrad's Mr Kurtz: "The horror: the horror."


True knowledge is an expansion into things unknown. Knowledge has no fixed temporal dimension and cannot be used to stabilize any form or state, including the state of understanding that this cannot be. Art, as such, can be approached in two ways: as continuous temporal change, a matter of style, or as content. Horizontal or vertical. The vertical responds to the condition in itself, its atemporality. The horizontal remains with the phenomenon. My way is the former, an approach largely outside the contemporary frame and not 'seen.'


Yet the seeing capacity of people unaffected by a current aesthetic is broader. This is the value in the plain eye. The informed eye glances aside, the uninitiated eye looks straight. Not with certainty but with a certain wonder and a hint of the fear that all visualized images bring. The plain eye is corrupted by mass imagery, but by contrast it sees when an image has depth in content. Mass imagery has no intrinsic force and cannot of itself be corrupt. Its corrupting effect is its temporality, repetition and replication. The vertical image breaks this horizontal surface.

There is no art without form and no form without content. Art cannot be authentic for its time. Its strength is opposition to a time. I have an approach but not a language; content but not form, the trunk but not the branches. Each painting gropes - content to form, form to content - using whatever intimations might bring about a synthesis. I turn often to myth for the vertical significance it has.


Tone, then, becomes critical. Figures and actions come by dark and light in collision, by force-lines to hold the directions of mass within the defining plane, by subtle losses throughout. Depth is reached by form drawn from content. Subject-matter is no more than enabling. If I title a series of works: 'From the Bacchae of Euripdes,' motif, only, is intended.


The vicar of a local church asks for a painting of the resurrection, a sequel to a Crucifixion I did for the church some years ago. Interpretation is left to me, now as then. For the vicar and his congregation the subject-matter is conceptual. For me no more than enabling. It has its specifics. I take these as definite, together with given size and spatial limits; the picture plane and its four edges.


Crucifixion is a known event, Resurrection its extension beyond knowing and tangibility. Painting cannot pass through these boundaries. I turn, therefore, to myth, to verticality. The dead man on the cross and the double death of Christian belief is a passion, compulsion, obsession, an addiction essential to life. All that counters it is perceived to be subversive: Fighting, repression, erasure, destruction, numbness, paralysis. But when these are acknowledged, welcomed, accepted, they are the very roots of creation.


The Dionysian transformation. From the cult of light, good and obedience comes the repressed Eros, heralding wildness, drunkenness and the abandon of the returning god of fertility; the god of union and life that cannot be denied. The dark body of the crucified; the darkness of an unseen face, and of the robe, moving in a wind. The ground is white: a warm, white, emptiness. The figure stands head to foot beyond the frame, stepping into the space of the church.




This will not be a rejectable image.


Don't do what you think is right. It isn't.


Kenneth Loynes