Alexander McCall Smith: Photography has its place, but painted portraits provide a more evocative depiction of who we are scotsman.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from scotsman.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Rarely can a portrait, including a dead body under a sheet, have created such a powerful, immediate, critical and public response.
Ken Currie, undoubtedly among the most significant painters of our time, is known for his dark side, his bleak, black pictures of haggard figures and harrowing happening, tortured flesh, forensic finales, illness, death. Long before Co-vid, he recognised the fragility, vulnerability and desperate aspects of human life and, never flinching, captured them with an evocative intensity.
Ken Currie Unknown Man
Death is also central to this new work. Yet, it is transformed into a welcome statement about power for good, knowledge as key, medicine’s possibility to resolve problems, and – in the right hands, a consoling ability to reveal lost identity.
Died: April 13, 2021. THE death of Chris Carrell, not long after his 80th birthday and after Parkinson’s and age-related illnesses, has deeply saddened countless artists across the UK and beyond, while stirring magical memories among those who experienced his insightful practice of bringing art into the lives of people wherever he worked. His time as director of Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre (1978-1991) was undoubtedly a significant factor in Glasgow achieving its 1990 European City of Culture status, just as Sunderland and Portsmouth both gained a renewed sense of cultural identity from his astutely managed creative projects. He was born Ronald Christopher Carrell, at Barnard Castle, Co Durham, in March 1941. His father, Pilot Officer Ronald M. Carrell, died on a bombing raid in Germany in October 1940, before Chris was born, and is buried in the Commonwealth war cemetery at Charlottenberg, Berlin.
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