Ken Currie

About the Book: 

I think painting has to be more – much, much more – than about paint. There has to be a vision and a voice, a feeling that is as much about ideas and emotions as sensual visual experience. KEN CURRIE

Ken Currie: Paintings and Writings provides a unique insight into the thought-world of Ken Currie’s challenging and enigmatic art. For over four decades Currie has created some of the most confrontational and intriguing paintings in the contemporary art world.

For the first time, Currie has made available his studio journals. The result is a fascinating dialogue that explores the motives and aspirations of his inscrutable paintings.

Compiled and edited by the art historian Tom Normand, this book penetrates the creative imagination of a truly visionary artist.

Reviews:

Ken Currie: Paintings and Writings intimately relates the artist's worldview to his art through each phase of its evolution. ... Currie's writings range from commentary on the creation of individual paintings to his personal responses to political upheaval, war and humanitarian disaster around the world. ... a stimulating dialogue between the visual and the verbal on every page. Currie's art is beautifully reproduced in full colour, charting his work from early paintings commemorating the massacre of the Calton Weavers to his artistic response to war; he addresses corruption, both physical and moral, with the honesty and courage that is also exemplified in his medical portraits. ART PLUGGED

This book meshes the journals and thoughts of one of the country’s foremost artists with examples of their work. Together they help the reader build an appreciation of what he wants to say, and how/why his art has developed as it has. A fascinating book I’d recommend to all art lovers. RB, Scottish Field

About the Author:

KEN CURRIE studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1978 to 1983 and rose to attention in the 1980s. He is renowned for his unsettling portrayal of the human figure. The artist’s rich, luminous paintings depict mysterious rites, rituals, and quasi-medical practices, offering a meditation on violence in its many guises. Ken Currie has exhibited widely internationally. Currie’s work is held in many major public collections including Tate, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, New York Public Library, among others.

TOM NORMAND was born in Aberdour in Fife.  He was educated in Dunfermline, and subsequently took a degree in Sociology and Politics at Glasgow College.  His doctoral thesis, in the Sociology of Culture, was taken at Durham University.  He has taught at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, and, since 1982, has lectured in the History of Art at the University of St Andrews.  He has published widely in the history of British art with a special interest in developments in art and photography in Scotland.  He has lectured, nationally and internationally, on Scottish art, culture and society.