The folly of ambition

Andrew Lambirth talks to the artist Keith Coventry about drawing inspiration from Sickert, Churchill and Ladybird Books

Keith Coventry has no time to visit the two lap-dancing clubs that lurk a few doors down from his studio, a small room with barred windows in a light-industrial block in the East End. Here, he puts in long hours, often forgetting to eat in his total immersion in the act of putting paint on canvas. He grudgingly admits to being a workaholic.

This is where he painted ‘Spectrum Jesus’, which two months ago won him the £25,000 John Moores Painting Prize, one of the most prestigious accolades in the art world. Winning the John Moores does not guarantee immortality — not much does, except perhaps genius — but it can make a difference. Coventry joins some of the big names of modern British art of the past half-century: Roger Hilton, David Hockney, Euan Uglow, John Hoyland, Peter Doig are all former winners, as well as a number of artists unjustly neglected today, such as Henry Mundy, Myles Murphy and Mick Moon. The prize is awarded every two years at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool to the best work from an open submission, and is judged by a panel of experts. This year Gary Hume, Alison Watt and Sir Norman Rosenthal were among the judges.

Coventry (born 1958) is pleased to have won the John Moores. It is perhaps a measure of the enviable international reputation he has established over the past decade or so, and a recognition of his remarkable versatility. For Coventry paints in a number of very distinct styles, and seems to embody the stylistic plurality so typical of our age. He makes what look like minimalist abstracts inspired by the layout of housing estates; he paints white-on-white abstracts which are actually scenes of typical Englishness, such as the royal family at public functions; he makes sculptures of snapped-off saplings or destroyed park benches from inner-city no-go areas; he paints black-on-black abstracts based on flower-arranging or bright Mediterranean scenes by Dufy; and he reinterprets Sickert in a series of figurative paintings called ‘Echoes of Albany’.