Kenneth Webb

A significant contributor to Irish landscape painting since the 1950s, Kenneth Webb renews his association with the Kenny Gallery…

A significant contributor to Irish landscape painting since the 1950s, Kenneth Webb renews his association with the Kenny Gallery, Galway, extending back to 1971, with his current show there.

In this show of 38 works, which offers no new vision, we are reminded of some of the most productive phases of this painter's career; the poppyscapes, the inventive blanket bog and wild garden paintings.

The artist continues in this show to be obsessed with the oriental poppy, which he associates with the Western landscape, endowing its floral individuality with a symbolist presence as in the big Elysian Fields. Texture and material surfaces are always vital to the work of this artist but, in some instances, he makes sensitive use of spattering to create a pointilliste or divisionist effect. In his observation of blanket bogs, as in Into The Bog, Mr Webb extracts a painterly response amounting to a very individual vibrant abstraction. Interesting, too is the big, totemistic, strongly-stated Guardian of the past, which conforms to no apparent formula and projects an expressionist spontaneity.