Ken Howard

There is one letter from Ken Howard to Ruth Borchard, dated '18th October 1963' and headed neatly by hand, 'Ken Howard A.R.C.A. 402a Kings Road, Chelsea, S.W10'. 'I have dispatched today, by post, the self portrait about which you wrote to me last week. I hope you like it. The price of the painting is 15gns. The painting was done early last year whilst I was living in north London, and has only been exhibited once, at the New English exhibition [...] I hope some time in the future to accept your very kind invitation to call & see your very considerable & interesting collection of self portraits.'

Self-Portrait at Cricklewood is dated verso 1961, when the artist was around thirty years old. It shows him in front of his canvas, a brush resting in his lowered left hand, his unseen right hand presumably raised in the act of painting. A blank-edged canvas is set on the wooden easel at the right of the picture. Though informal in his open-necked white shirt and dark, brown-black sweater, the artist seems quite meditatively upright in posture, utterly still and self-absorbed. Daylight streaming from an unseen window to his right hews out strong facial features right down to his firm, straight neck. His eyes seem impenetrably dark, the whites barely visible. The full, sensual lips are inexpressive and immobile. This is a noble-looking face that, in both its sunny and shadowed aspects, gives little away.

The figure, 'crowned' by the curving decorative wooden top of the mantelpiece behind, is at the centre of the composition. Above him hangs a shadowy portrait (maybe a poster), and some other pictures indiscernible in their details, postcards of paintings perhaps, tacked onto the wall. The mantelpiece portrait seems to proclaim the central significance of the human figure both in his studio and his art. The foreground, almost monochrome figure contrasts strongly with the bright ruddy tones of the fireplace and the vivid yellow band on (or perhaps below) the picture on the wall. This is a work of carefully deliberated geometric planes – the two long horizontal bars (one black, one brown) to the right of the picture, for example, seem to question  limits to, and boundaries of, what it is possible to convey in such a self-portrayal.

In early 2015, Dr Robert Travers, Director of the Piano Nobile Gallery, visited Ken Howard in his studio, and made a short film of their conversation as he presented the artist with a picture in bubble wrap. Howard opened it, and came face to face with his 1961 self-portrait, exclaiming, 'Good lord! It's a good half century since I've seen it [...] At that time I was really influenced by early Victor Pasmore, and used to scrape the paint down [...] I never did what we called 'Tonking' – which was putting newspaper [onto the picture surface] to take paint off [a method used by the artist and art teacher Henry Tonks] – but [...] you can see the paint is overall quite thin because it's been scraped down.

'It's interesting the way one's work does develop. I always think that [artists] develop in two ways – they are either like one of my favourite painters Corot or Velàzquez where their final paintings are really a much more developed expression of their language – or somebody like Picasso who moves [around in terms of style] and then draws back and creates then something out of it all. But I'm someone who bangs away at the same nail, if you like, and this [the 1961 self-portrait] was one of the early nails – and that's [indicating a middle-period self-portrait] one of the middle nails – and that's [indicating a recent self-portrait] one of the late nails – but in fact the language is the same.

'Great portrait painters like Velàzquez paint the inner person. [For] lesser mortals [...] the commissioned portrait tends to be [on] the surface whereas when you paint the self-portrait, whether you like it or not, you start painting what's within you [...]'

Of his Self-Portrait (1952: Collection: Royal Academy of Arts, London), a probing look at a serious yet still innocent-looking twenty-year-old countenance in a palette inclining to rusty reds and browns, he has written,  'At Hornsey [School of Art] we were set weekend homework and a self-portrait was one such subject. One of my first oil paintings on canvas, it was scraped down with a palette knife. At the time I was very much influenced by the early work of Victor Pasmore. I got to know him many years later when he was elected to the Royal Academy.'

Another oil self-portrait (1954) set in a Plymouth barrack room, gives a closer view of a ruggedly contoured head and upper torso. The muscular uprightness of his neck and steely look of his features, tell us this is a questing, determined young man (then just twenty-two). 'This self-portrait was greatly influenced by a life-size self-portrait by Stanley Spencer [...] who influenced many of us during my early years at Hornsey School of Art.'

In Light and Dark. The Autobiography of Ken Howard, (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2011), he wrote, 'Nowadays I have to admit the only portraits I do are self-portraits. I think all artists are intrigued by self-portraiture, and there are many advantages in it. The model is always there when wanted and does not move because you are looking in the mirror at your own image. [...] Certainly, you get to know your own head very well, its proportions and facial expressions...'. Self-Portrait with Borsalino(c.2000) – in which the artist appears as a dark, silhouetted figure standing at the easel in his studio against tall windows, his rather occluded yet still alert features with just a glint on one of his lenses and his silver hair peeping from beneath his stylish hat – 'was inspired by a self-portrait by Goya, although his work was on a smaller scale. [...] This is the first self-portrait I did wearing a hat, partly because in my later years I feel almost undressed without one, and partly because Goya wears one in his self-portrait.'

In other quite recent self-portraits, the artist appears as a shadowy, quite mysteriously withdrawn presence amidst a panoramic still life of all the sharply rendered artistic accoutrements and paraphernalia of his spacious studio.

Self-Portrait at Seventy-six (2009) is a plain and austere self-reckoning of the artist in a sombre black jersey, with keen yet melancholic, weathered features and dishevelled silvery hair, all shimmering with light. In 2011 he wrote, 'This is the last of many self-portraits that I have done over the years. If I had my like again, I would make a [self-]portrait every year, almost like keeping a diary.'

Born in 1932 in the north-west London suburb of Cricklewood, Howard showed an early interest in drawing. His father, a factory worker, bought him a paintbox, which cost three times his weekly wage, and during the war Ken sketched in the air-raid shelter beneath the factory where his father worked. From 1949-53, he studied at Hornsey School of Art, where he eschewed fashionable abstract influences in favour of his growing interest in Velàzquez, and in contemporaries such as Stanley Spencer, Ben Shahn and, soon enough, his Kitchen Sink School contemporaries.

         'One of the most active clubs in the school was the sketch club [...] John Berger [1926-2017], then a young art critic and now a very eminent writer, came along [...] I remember he was one of the first critics who ever encouraged me. Others, such as Ruskin Spear, a very good, young up-and-coming painter; Carel Weight, who was to become Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art; and the future Royal Academician Robert Buhler used to come along to do these 'crits'. They did in fact go on to the staff at the Royal College, [...] so it sometimes helped at interview that you had come from Hornsey as they were slightly familiar with what you had done.' He was inspired by the emergence then of the Kitchen Sink School of painters such as John Bratby, Edward Middleditch, Derrick Greaves and Jack Smith – 'powerful young painters just out of the Royal College'. Of the 'postwar romantic movement, including [...] John Minton and John Craxton, and the Scottish painters Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde' as well as William Scott and Lucian Freud ('I remember clearly the paintings he was then doing of Francis Bacon and Johnny Minton – quite astonishing portrait works for a man as young as that.'), he has written: 'This was all new, and very exciting.'

In 1953, he spent six weeks travelling in Spain, 'a treasure trove for me in many ways. The black paintings and etchings of Goya, Las Meninas, the Velàzquez portraits, the work of Zurburan and El Greco all provided very exciting influences.' Soon after his return, small but panoramic paintings he had made of railway sidings in Cricklewood and Neasden in 1952 – lovely, rigorously structured tone poems of urban industrial life – were awarded, controversially, 'first, second and third prize in watercolour' by Ruskin Spear, judging a local art competition. A comparable picture is an oil painting, Railway Sidings (Collection: Plymouth City Council: Museum and Art Gallery), in which details such as a railway signalling box, a rudimentary wooden railway wagon, workmen and telegraph poles are depicted in subtly impressionistic grisaille tones.

'I loved industrial north London. I loved the power stations with the men pouring out at the end of the day. I loved the railway sidings, the cooling towers, the terraced houses – all of which [...] were in tune with what was going on at the time, such as the Kitchen Sink school and Edward Middleditch's paintings of Sheffield and the northern towns.'

After Hornsey, Howard spent two years doing his National Service, serving in the armed forces, a time of 'very rigorous training'. 'I used to draw every evening in the barracks, eventually getting the men to sit for me and beginning to work on big compositions at the weekends or in the evening.' Then from 1955-58, he attended the Royal College of Art, where his tutors included Carel Weight (q.v.), Ruskin Spear and Robert Buhler. Jack Beddington, who had written Young Artists of Promise in 1957 and was a director of London's Wildenstein Gallery, visited Howard's Diploma Show in 1958, and was impressed enough to give him a show on his return from a scholarship year in Italy – where Howard had visited the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi in Bologna.

As he recorded in Light and Dark, 'I didn't have a happy time at the Royal College [...] interest in painting was shifting away from the Kitchen Sink and Romantic schools that had been so strong after the war […] The movement towards America and Abstract Expressionism made me feel [...] isolated. I still believed in what I was doing, but I was certainly made to question the whole process.

'The best thing about the Royal College was the other students [...] There were many very talented people in my year [...] My year included people such as Charles Hardaker [b.1934; a painter, as he says, of his 'immediate surroundings' whose still lifes 'aim to show something of the wonder and mystery of the so-called ordinary world'], a member of the New English Art Club [...] and Ian Simpson [1933-2011], a very good painter who [...] eventually became principal of St Martin's. There were artists such as Olwyn Bowey [b.1936; whose portraits of figures such as the art writer Mervyn Levy(1914–1996) (c.1960: Collection: Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales); L.S. Lowry (Portrait Sketch (1963-64); Collection: Tate); and Carel Weight(c.1976; Collection: Royal Academy of Arts) are remarkable for their humanity, shrewd observational humour and subtle, sonorous use of colour] and Sonia Lawson [b.1934; a painter whose recent work has been described as 'a sort of Rosetta Stone, at times intriguingly arcane and inscribed with living, jostling beings, depicting the elemental'], both of whom have since become Royal Academicians.' Interestingly, Lawson recalled (in an interview with Fiona Maddocks for RA Magazine (Autumn 2015)) that teaching attitudes towards women students at the Royal College were 'narrow. I remember Carel Weight, who taught painting there, saying to me, “Do you think a woman can be a good painter?”'

Howard recalled: 'The teaching [...] at the Royal College was in a sense indirect. A good example [...] is shown in the case of a painting of a nude which hangs in my studio to this day [...] it was in a particular state at lunchtime, and Roger de Grey (q.v.), senior lecturer in painting [...] came along and looked at it. 'That's very good,' he said. 'Don't touch it', which was quite unusual for him. But after lunch I carried on [...] Later he came back into the room and said, 'You have touched it, haven't you? You've ruined it.

'The person I met at the college who most affected my life [...] was Carel Weight [...] He [...] could teach by inspiration, and in a very indirect way. During his time as professor he produced a continuous stream of people who would make their mark on the visual arts. David Hockney flourished at the Royal College, as did Peter Phillips [q.v.] and Derek Boshier. The whole of the Pop Art movement burgeoned, and yet in his own work Carel was not about any of that [...] he stimulated [people] to find their own language from the beginning [...]

'Some very interesting people also came and lectured to us at the College. The [American] painter and illustrator Ben Shahn [1898-1969] came [...] to give a lecture [...] He was [...] emphasising that drawing was about the particular, not about the general. To illustrate the point he said, “When I draw a pair of trousers, I want people to know whether they are $50 pair of trousers or a $30 pair...” That hit home with me, and I thought that in future I will make sure that my drawings are particular [...] This has nothing to do with detail. Shahn's drawings were not detailed academic drawings, but very simplified pieces of art. The simplification and abstraction got down to the actual essence of what the drawing was about [...]

'Another important aspect of Hornsey and the Royal College were the models [...] I particularly remember Quentin Crisp […] in the very early 50s. Quentin delighted in being able to hold difficult poses. He loved to hold a pose of the crucifixion, for example, where he would hold his arms up and stand there for a long time, never complaining. He had a long pole that he used to make his particular poses. They were always full of life and movement, and one felt that he was as involved in the process as the students who were trying to draw him [… he went on to become] a great entertainer and raconteur, but in the early days he was a very fine and professional model.'

In the mid-60s, Howard created a series of densely impastoed views of the facades of Westminster Abbey and other London churches. His next predominant subject, over a number of years, was the river Thames. But without a human element he found himself lost. 'It's like asking me to paint an empty studio. For me a landscape comes to life when the figure becomes part of it. It's possible because the figure moves, is alive, and is constantly making you reassess.'

From 1971, Howard regularly exhibited at the New Grafton Gallery in south-west London under its director David Wolfers (1917-2001). In his Obituary of Wolfers in the Guardian (17^th January 2002), the artist Fred Cuming (q.v.) wrote: 'The dream of David Wolfers, who has died aged 84, was to run a gallery. This he realised in 1967 when, having raised £9,000, he launched the New Grafton in London's Mayfair. It was to become one of the best small galleries in London, a place with a loyal following, because David put the gallery and his artists before money. A champion of new talent – Ken Howard was with David from the beginning – there were also Sheila Fell, Ben Levene [q.v.] and many others.

'By the early 1980s, having already moved from Hay Hill to Bond Street, he was forced to relocate to Barnes by rent rises. A number of his regular artists followed him, among them Peter Greenham, Carol Weight and Josef Herman. Around these stalwarts, he encouraged gifted young painters to show, and in recent years the gallery was an island of stability. People stayed with him because they liked and trusted him. He did not change with the vagaries of fashion.' Howard became a Royal Academician in 1991. From 15^th March to 6^th  April 2018, he had a debut exhibition at the Portland Gallery, London SW1.

In 1973, Howard was commissioned to paint in Northern Ireland by the Imperial War Museum (initially just for five weeks, though he spent much of the next seven years preoccupied with painting life in the province and the British soldiers serving there). 'Northern Ireland [...] suited me wonderfully. It was extremely dramatic visually – in 1973 there were still quite a lot of very run-down, near-derelict houses. [...] I couldn't have asked for a better commission because it harked back to my origins [...] the working-class areas of Neasden and Cricklewood.' Over the next five years he was similarly commissioned to paint the armed forces in Belize, Brunei, Cyprus, Hong Kong and Nepal.

His subtly detailed yet spectacular triptych Ulster Crucifixion (1978) was awarded a prize in the annual John Moores exhibition in Liverpool. It depicts a young Irish boy who has shinned up a lamp-post, and is now suspended by his arms from a high-up crossbar. This lad is set against the backdrop of a Belfast brick wall covered with both Catholic and Protestant political graffiti (such as 'NO POPE HERE' and, against a Union Jack flag, 'ARMY OUT') and, scrawled roughly in chalk, the macabre outlines of a human skeleton. At the peak of the picture's cruciform is a snapshot of three children burnt to death in their home in a sectarian attack; 'I don't support either side,' Howard has said.

In his 1975 oil painting, Southall 2: Silver Morning, Howard returned to the subject of his early 50s railway paintings. At the centre is a cruciform telegraph pole; on either side are straight and curving railway lines catching the silvery morning light. This painting, with its tacit religious overtones, is a melodious evocation of a desolate spot at an early hour (Howard has always been keen on painting at first light), with realistic forms verging on geometric abstraction.

Howard has also produced many diaphanous watercolours of Venice and of Cornish beaches – he has a second home in the fishing village of Mousehole – and also of seascapes and landscapes throughout Europe and Asia – based predominantly on a Sickert-like palette suddenly sparkling with Turneresque light and movement. From the early 1980s onwards, the subjects of many paintings became increasingly the interiors of two impressive studios he shared with his second wife, the painter Christa Gaa (1937-1992; he had first met her during his scholarship year in Italy; she went on to become a painter of magically luminous watercolour still life arrays of small domestic artefacts and objets d'art) in Cornwall and London (the latter studio had once belonged to the Society portrait painter and brilliant self-portraitist Sir William Orpen). Howard says, 'In the studio I love painting the model with the light coming through her hair or just catching down the body'.

He has said, 'I was brought up in London surrounded by railway yards and factories. This has very much influenced the use of horizontal and vertical structures and lines in my work. I am not a landscape painter, but rather a vertical, horizontal and linear painter, which is why I have a passion for the lines that occur within my studios, and include them in my paintings. When I study a model, I think of that figure not in rhythmical terms, but in vertical or horizontal positions and planes.'

In 1986, he depicted one of his female models resting with a cigarette, after posing for a picture:

I thought it was a big subject and put the picture I had been working on aside. As students we were often told that you shouldn't allow yourself to see subjects like that and start painting with the finished picture in your mind's eye. We were told that you should discover it in the process of making the picture. I never believed that and I still don't believe that.

Once you have seen the painting in your mind's eye, you have got to get it down on the canvas. Obviously you run into problems, and you solve problems [...] You can't get an equivalent on the canvas for what you've imagined. But you have to have the imagination [...] about what a picture can become.

- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004