Wandering through the Summer show at the Royal Academy last weekend, one persons work that really struck a cord with me was that of Ian McKeever.
McKeever began painting in 1969, renting a studio from SPACE, London, following a degree in English Literature. His first solo show in London came four years later at the ICA.
In 1989 he was awarded the prestigious DAAD scholarship in Berlin, and this was followed in 1990 by a major retrospective exhibition of his work at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.
In the early years his work was landscape-based, reflecting the many journeys he made to such places as Greenland, Papua New Guinea and Siberia. He stopped making direct references to the landscape in the mid 1980s, and as shown above his work became more abstract, reflecting a growing interest in the human body and architectural structures.
The quality of light and presence in McKeever’s paintings have become increasingly important over the years. McKeever states"I tend to think that stillness, like the sublime, tends to get lost as soon as it is spoken about. "