04 December 2015

Keir Smith's sculptures at Henrietta House

Look up in London and you see all sorts of things - for instance, on the facade of an office building just off Oxford Street, these sculptures -




The artist is Keir Smith (1950-2007) - here he is with  his work -

The building was finished in 1992, and you can see good photos of "From the Dark Cave", as the series is known, here. (Some of them could now do with a bit of a cleanup.)

From the obituary

The sources for Keir's mature work were based in the art, architecture and sculpture of the Italian Renaissance. He was passionate about little-known painters and sculptors as well as the masters, learned Italian and visited Italy regularly.

Keir's writings were extensive, personal, and at times very amusing. He was also somewhat akin to a gentleman pamphleteer, in that each of his later exhibition catalogues, many of which he published, contained his learned essays on the works that inspired him.

Drawing was vital to Keir, not so much as plans for sculpture, but works of tangential subject matter, often worked carefully in pencil and watercolour or made in acrylic over long periods of intense activity. He was never without a sketchbook. Towards the end of his life, during bouts of chemotherapy, unable to sleep at four in the morning, he would walk to the Thames, where he drew and painted the water, bleak compositions with broken wooden poles rising through the surface.

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