Cecil King

Cecil King was born in Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow and began to paint in 1954 when he was already in his early thirties. At the time he was a business man with a reputation as a collector of modern art both Irish and Foreign. It was his collection which initially prompted him to paint. His first style in painting owed much to the work of Nevill Johnson with whom he took his first and only classes. In the late 1950s he did a series of cityscapes of Ringsend and the Docks of Dublin painted in muted tones with an emphasis on form and shape rather than detail or anecdote. These canvases marked a transition on his work that was of de Stael and Soulages. The Municipal Gallery's November (1964) with its dramatic interplay of broad stretches of paint, boldly applied in subtle tones of blues, greys and blacks, is an excellent example of this period in King's development. In the second half of the 1960s he produced a body of work in pastel, based on themes of stress and tension from the world of the circus. In 1967 he met Barnett Newman, the acknowledged pioneer of colour field and hard edge painting in America. Newman's philosophy, based on the supremacy of the canvas itself over all illusion or expression and especially over the emotion-loaded brush of abstract expressionism, became an important element in King's future work. In the Berlin series of paintings and prints that he worked on in the early 1970s the canvas was divided into mathematically precise areas of colour separated by thin, often white, lines that added a spatial dimension to the composition. Despite the extremely restricting rules of hard edge painting, King managed in these and subsequent pictures consistently to present impeccable, modern canvases of brilliant colour and clarity that are individual and recognisably his own.

Tension and force were states which King had frequently explored in his earlier work and which continued to interest him in the 1981s. Although Cecil King only began to paint full time in 1964, he was deeply committed to every aspect of his art and his business and organisational skills helped him to present to the public, not only his own work, but also that of other contemporary artists both Irish and foreign. He was closely associated with the Rosc international exhibitions and was a founder member of the Contemporary Irish Art Society. In 1974 he represented Ireland at Cagnes-sur-Mer Festival of Painting and apart from regular one-man shows in Ireland, England, Scotland and the United States, there were also two major retrospective exhibitions of his work held during his lifetime at Kilkenny in 1975 and Dublin in 1981.