Oceans and forests in kaleidoscopic flow – discovering Keith Grant

For decades I’ve been aware of the work of Keith Grant (born 1930), but it is only in recent years that I have come to know it at all well. During that time both the style and the subject of his paintings have undergone a series of remarkable revolutions, as he determined not to rest on his laurels, but to explore the fundamentals of his approach and interests. You don’t often see an artist doing this, particularly one over the age of 80, when an ‘everything goes’ Old Age Style is a more common development. Through his radical questioning of precepts, Grant has pioneered what might be called (somewhat paradoxically) a Young Age Style, in which he returns to the basics of his first love — landscape painting — and reinvestigates its appeal, while at the same time exploring the eternal verities of paint: texture, line, colour, the vocabulary of gesture and impasto. There is something ineffably compelling about this new work of Grant’s: it has the unquenchable energy and optimism of youth, tempered by the wisdom of long experience. It’s a heady combination.

A selection of Grant’s latest work, together with one or two earlier pictures, is the centrepiece of the Summer Show at Chris Beetles. Beetles is renowned for his championing of art that is realistic and often highly illustrative, but he also has a taste for the painterly approach — witness his enthusiasm for the work of Peter Coker (1926–2004), former Kitchen Sink realist, and for the lyrical and metaphysical investigations of Keith Grant. Thus Beetles’ latest summer exhibition presents a range of varied and sometimes little known talent, from Edward Steel Harper to Edmund Blampied and William Walcot, but I have to say that for me Grant completely steals the show.