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.