Ron King - Alphabets, Bandits & Collaborations

Ron King Alphabets, Bandits & Collaborations

goldmark

He is the wayward prince of artist book publishers and a cheerfully subversive thinker who makes multi-layered works which continue to stimulate and intrigue.

Andrew Lambirth

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Ron King

Ron King

Alphabets, Bandits & Collaborations Andrew Lambirth

goldmark 2019

An introduction to the work of Ron King

Fortifying the idea

Artists’ books are a development of the great French tradition of livres d’artiste, in turn part of the history of illustrated manuscripts which began in the Middle Ages, but reached its first peak of real independence with William Blake’s extraordinary hand-made books of the late 18th century. The painter, printmaker and sculptor Ron King (born 1932) spearheaded the post-war artists’ books movement in this country, in which the book is intended as the work of art.

Founding Circle Press in 1967, for more than half-a-century he has made books himself, and in collaboration with other artists and writers, which have changed the way we think about book art. He is the wayward prince of artist book publishers and a cheerfully subversive thinker who makes multi-layered works which continue to stimulate and intrigue. Not surprisingly, he has been little recognised in this country and is much more highly regarded in America. This celebration of his achievement is thus not only most welcome, but also long overdue.

No home counties background has been responsible for King’s extreme intellectual restlessness. He was born in Brazil, the only child of a half-English, half-Irish father and a Sephardic mother, and lived there until he was 12, when he was sent to England to be educated. Some of his most formative experiences were Brazilian:

Tortoise, construction, 1992

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the importance of masks in his imagery probably stems from the masked figures he saw as a boy in the Brazilian Carnival. In much the same way, his competitive kite flying on the beach in Brazil, with each boy running four or five home-made kites and conducting long aerial battles with them, later fed into his puppet imagery. Also his interest in bandits was first kindled by stories of Brazilian gangs.

Arriving in England, he was made to feel different, and dealt with the need to prove himself as the half-Jewish boy from Brazil - very much an outsider in a British public school - by becoming a boxer.

He readily admits he’s combative and disputatious, but this aspect of his character has also given him the will to achieve.

King’s father allowed him to study commercial art in an evening class at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, but he was more interested in painting and quickly demonstrated this by winning a scholarship at Chelsea School of Art, where the teachers included Ceri Richards and Robert Medley. After art school King emigrated to Canada with his young wife, working in magazine design while continuing to paint (1956-60). This experience released him, and his painting took on new authority. Returning to England to paint for a solo exhibition in Toronto, he ended up by staying in the UK. His interest in painting waned and he took up silkscreen printing. He began by making silkscreened monoprints, then moved on to editions, and his second career as a print-maker was launched.

If he was first a painter, in printmaking King found a new and fruitful identity that led him directly to the artists’ books that have made his name. The two great print sequences in this exhibition are taken from The Prologue and The Song of Solomon. Like many of

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Cangaceiro, Masks, screenprint, 1971/2

the most effective of King’s works, they are directly related to artist books he has designed and made himself. King’s first book project was to originate images to illustrate, interpret or otherwise accompany The Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Published in 1966, the book consists of letterpress text with 14 screenprints, each representing a single character in the story. They include the red, black and green design for the Squire, strongly reminiscent of one of Allen Jones’ Pop Art bus paintings, and a slyly sensual curvaceous combination of silver, dark blue and black for the Nun. One of the most memorable images is the quartered boxy portrait of the Wife of Bath, which takes the red and green polarity and jazzes it up even further with a rich blue and teasing ribands. Arrived at through the collage technique of cut and torn paper, these images are based on abstract representations of African masks and yet they encapsulate specific character just as if they were figurative images.

King took inspiration from heraldry, medieval costume design and the Church (crosses and fleurs-de-lys), inventing a language liberally mixing past and present that drew on the contemporary 1960s idioms of Pop and Abstract art, but distanced them by the use of mask forms. These bold designs and saturated colours exert a lasting impact and are the first sustained example of King’s passion for working in series. He relishes the accumulation of related images to make a point or underline an effect. In the case of the Nun, he used his own discarded prints, chopped up and redeployed. By contrast, the Pardoner’s genesis was in a book of tile designs. His equally beautiful images for The Song of Solomon from the Old Testament were first published in 1969 and seemingly more abstract in impulse.

Wife of Bath, Chaucer’s Prologue, screenprint, 1978

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In fact they mark a greater integration of text and image, and embody an entirely suitable voluptuousness which matches and enhances the text.

The old demarcations between artist and printmaker were being torn down in the 1960s and King benefited from this. His own personal trajectory has been from paint to print to sculpture. He is not only an archetypal artist-craftsman, but what he makes is always unexpected and gloriously individual. In fact, King is so very wideranging in his interests that he challenges anyone to find a signature style to his work. He has never wanted to limit himself to a single way of looking or a consistent method of solving problems. He adopts a multi-faceted approach, seeing different sides of a situation, and different solutions. He values fluidity and variety, thrives on change. His voracious visual appetite is fed by films, books, art galleries, street culture. He loves great literature as well as nursery rhymes and folk tales.

Once he has hit upon a theme he wants to explore further, he researches it thoroughly, ‘fortifying the idea’ as he puts it, in libraries and museums. Thereafter he relies upon memory and imagination to reinterpret this raw material, drawing and making collages of found photographic (usually printed) material. Chance is important in the generation of his tersely compact imagery, while his liking for narrative is balanced by a formal creativity, an ability to be inventive with shape and colour and line. A shocking but enduring image is of the decapitated heads of bandits: an image that entered his consciousness in childhood when he discovered a book about the Brazilian rebel gang of Lampião. In the 1920s and ’30s, Lampião terrorised north-eastern Brazil with all kinds of savagery and

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Family I, collage

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LampiĂŁo, Brazil and Bandits, etching & aquatint, 1960 Bandit Heads, wood, 1985-1990

destruction, but also sometimes in the style of Robin Hood, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. King has called bandits his ‘true obsession’, and there is perhaps something of the bandit in his own artistic make-up: the buccaneer who helps himself from the rich cultural emporia of the world, and then takes passage to the New World to sell his transformed booty to book collectors and libraries.

He may not commit murder (though some of his subjects do), but he is still something of an outlaw or outsider. You can see why he might call bandits his mentors.

Andrew Lambirth is a writer, critic and curator. Among his many books are monographs on John Armstrong, Roger Hilton, Maggi Hambling, John Hoyland, Margaret Mellis, Allen Jones, LS Lowry, David Inshaw, RB KItaj and Francis Davison.

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Bandits, life-size constructions, 1985-1990

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Baby Doll, Masks, screenprint, 1971/2

Cardinal, Masks, screenprint, 1971/2

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Parrot, construction, 1992

Chicken Hawk, construction, 1992

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Clock Patience, screenprint, 1981

Red Dial Patience, screenprint, 1981

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Lexicon I & Golden Spout, New York Series, screenprints, 1971/2

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Alphabet - Untitled, collage, paint, pencil & crayon

The Half-Year Letters, mixed media & collage

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The Furnace, Alphabet Series, cardboard relief & acrylic, 1985/86 White, Blue, Red ABCs, cut & folded paper with hand-colouring, 2019

Nobody has made books more beautifully than Ron King.

Mel Gooding

Three Books Turn Over Darling, 1990 Bluebeard’s Castle, 1972 Going, Going ... Gone! 2013

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Chaucer’s Prologue, screenprints, 1978

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Rabbit, Anansi Company, mixed media, 1992

Cat, Anansi Company, mixed media, 1992

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Song of Solomon Suite, screenprints, 1981

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Macbeth Suite, screenprints, 1970

Photograph courtesy Domo magazine

Text: © Andrew Lambirth Design: Porter/Goldmark Images: Christian Soro Jay Goldmark John Christie Hugh Gilbert Simon Hempsell

Goldmark Gallery 14 Orange Street Uppingham Rutland LE15 9SQ 01572 821424 goldmarkart.com ISBN 978-1-909167-64-3

Catalogue produced to accompany Ron King’s exhibition at Goldmark Gallery in April 2019

FILM DOCUMENTARY Visit goldmarkart.com to view our 50 minute film on Ron King

MayDayMayDayMayDay, screenprint, 2019 back cover: Bandit Rider, wood construction

Circle Press The name Circle Press was chosen by Ron King in 1967 to support his vision of a group of likeminded persons working within a shared, supportive framework, a circle which over the period of time has enlarged to include over 100 artists and poets.

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