Expressing the North
Judith LeGrove
When The North Lands opened at Roland Browse & Delbanco, in January 1967, its landscapes were hailed for their ‘sense of infinite space’, their artist, Keith Grant (b.1930), as ‘uncompromising … stern, virile’. Resulting from visits to Iceland and Norway, Grant’s paintings of volcanoes, fjords, avalanches and the midnight sun splintered and blazed, their energy focused – if scarcely contained – through the lens of abstraction. Nearly sixty years on, in the adjacent premises of The Redfern Gallery, The Last Ice presents new paintings. If their subject is similar, the manner of depicting these ‘north lands’ is astonishingly vital. Now in his 95th year, painting with undiminished skill, Grant relays his vision of landscape with authority and passion.
As Grant describes them, ‘these new pictures are an expression of the North’. Returning from Newcastle to the Danish port of Esbjerg, some twenty years ago, he witnessed sheet ice extending for miles, etched with a design of seemingly precision-cut cracks. Arctic ice off Iceland’s north coast in 1965 was equally haunting: ‘huge ice floes, but smooth on the top, and the further out you got, the more they moved’. Grant’s preoccupation with ice, cold and the North reaches as far back as his origins in northwest England. As a boy, he marvelled at Liverpool’s dockyard cranes encrusted with ice in winter, delighted in ‘snow, pine trees and Christmas’, and wondered where the weather came from.
The starting point for The Last Ice was a painting of a meteorite cascade. As Grant worked on the sky, isolating the abstract shapes of meteor trails, their forms began to reflect, in his words, ‘the “cubist” structures I have always associated with the elemental landscapes of the North’. Such geometry inspired Triptych of the Last Ice, painted
between March and September 2024. Three canvases, Meteor, Volcano and Aurora [illus. pp. 24-25], allude to the melting of polar ice in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions through fire, a broken procession of icebergs, and fracturing. Each element has been seen in Grant’s work before. What is particularly exhilarating about Triptych of the Last Ice, however, is the dynamic arc across its three paintings. Within this, Grant maintains a tightrope balance between ambiguity (the nebulousness of smoke, sea spume, the aurora’s veils) and geometry. It is the last of these, in particular the device of the triangle, that ‘percolated through to everything else’.
So why is the triangle so expressive of ice? Grant explains that the North, where glaciation was extreme, emerged from the Ice Age only around 10,000 years ago. It was effectively a new landscape, with all the acute contrasts that entailed: sharply delineated rocks, ascents, plains and lowlands, vast moraines of sand, and lines indicating the limits of the ice as it retreated to the Arctic. On the north coast of Denmark, gravel beaches taper to a vanishing point where the sea appears to obliterate them. At Grenen, near Skagen, the seas of the Skagerrak and Kattegat collide across a bank of alluvial deposits that shift, tidally, depending on the calmness or violence of the waves. Several paintings in The Last Ice series allude to such imagery.
Complementing these works, a series entitled The Narrow Road to the Deep North refers to Matsuo Bashō’s prose and verse diary of a journey through Japan in the late 17th century. Bashō’s account has long fascinated Grant, most obviously for its ‘journeying’ (an activity he relishes, particularly over austere, solitary terrain). Grant mapped Bashō’s destinations to locations in Norway to
create his own ‘narrow road to the deep north’. The resulting small-scale works on paper, exhibited by the Scottish Arts Council in 1973, evoked landscape with Blakean intensity, in luminous watercolours rimmed by handwritten inscriptions. When Grant revisited Bashō’s text during the pandemic, he continued the spirit of more recent ‘metamorphic’ paintings by seeking an equivalence between natural forms. Fish Bird Duality (2021) addresses the parity between sea and airborne creatures in tableaux that spiral and float, hybridising feathers with gills, beaks with gullets, eyes with roe or pearls. Grant’s latest Narrow Road to the Deep North paintings contain similarly startling juxtapositions. A bonsai tree anchors the landscape as if glimpsed through a window, framed by brocade drapery or by a phalanx of birch trees resembling a beaded curtain. Stacked, the imagery rises through trees, mountains and cloud to the sky and moon, evoking a symbolic passage so often implicit in oriental landscape painting. The repeated triangle (whether bonsai, curtains, or mountain peaks) again serves as scaffolding.
Grant’s retentive visual memory, allied to a limitless facility to reconfigure what he sees, is evident in a rich selection of earlier work. A rock formation near Lødingen, fused with the history of wartime blockhouses there, generated the Rock Horse series (2014) featuring glass frames pierced by icebound peaks. A further twist of the kaleidoscope produced Transfiguration [illus. pp.40-41], replete with unicorn, Goethe’s sphere and Brünnhilde’s ring of fire. The White Horse, the Moon and the Pergola (2022) [illus. p. 67] overlays recollections of the chalk horse at Uffington with a real white horse seen in Luxembourg, near a pergola and a Roman villa that had been ‘tidied up like a Lego game’.
What you see, in a painting by Grant, rarely correlates directly to a specific landscape, much though it may have
been inspired by one. Thus, he describes his new paintings as ‘a general statement’ about what one can expect to find in the North. Beaches, mountains, fjords and forests: each might be considered characteristic, yet still Grant finds fresh ways to depict them. Several recent seascapes feature a dark rim of waves that makes the canvas appear crinkled, breaking the predictability of the rectangular format. Transfigured Night III [illus. p.71] shimmers and shifts, instilled with the music of the stars. If many of Grant’s new paintings emphasise night, it is because of Grant’s belief that in the North there is a closer relationship between the earth and cosmos. The interplay between the two – the rivers, ice, hills, skies, aurora, stars, meteors, moon – are reminders of our place in the universe.
Birch trees have long been a symbol for Grant of resistance and survival. Seen from below, they acquire a delicate halo of foliage; standing isolate, they counterpoint the horizontal axis of a reflection that is darker than the original. Are these landscapes uninhabited? Not necessarily, although Grant prefers not to include figures in his compositions. Trees, instead, represent living presences, just as a flagpole and coastal beacon indicate former or recent habitation. A portrait of the much-loved apple tree in Grant’s garden in Norway is a case in point. What cannot be seen are the bird-feeders he fills regularly, or the house decorated for Christmas. Instead, Grant focuses attention, exquisitely, on the wire fence and gnarled form of the tree. Behind each painting, accumulated memories influence the forms of rocks, trees, space and light: aspects not derived solely from the landscape itself. The Narrow Road to the Deep North intertwines, in Grant’s mind, with Bashō’s account of an abandoned child. A white horse will always recall Vernon Watkins’ epic poem about former agricultural societies,
The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd, while unicorns (should they exist) evoke the splendour of French mediaeval tapestries.
During Grant’s involvement in the 1960s with Medical Aid for Vietnam, he explored parallels between the destructive force of volcanoes and that of military ordnance, albeit never acknowledging the latter overtly in his paintings’ imagery or titles. It is in this vein that he continues to be fascinated by the paradoxical beauty of natural catastrophe. On the fringe of the ice cap in Greenland are now extended coastal strips without ice, such that monumental icebergs can be witnessed passing fields with grass and flowers. Triptych of the Last Ice refers to dissolution while considering its potential to create new forms, new landscapes.
Eruption in the Northern Night (2025) [illus. p. 57] presents a sublime spectacle. Riven by the peak, cloud and meteor’s vector, its canvas shatters into triangles. The assertion that this is a ‘northern’ night is important. Grant’s painting conflates volcanoes seen in Iceland, sometimes at dangerously close hand, with the pristine white pyramid of Mount Fuji, whose shadow bids Bashō farewell as he embarks on his northern odyssey. Were it to be interpreted as Antarctica, it would symbolise not Mount Erebus’s intermittent stuttering but catastrophe on an apocalyptic scale: the reawakening by climate change of icebound volcanoes.
Is The Last Ice elegiac? Possibly, although Grant is adamant that the series should not be considered as an environmental statement (‘other people can make those if they wish’). Rather, as he explains, these new paintings imply that something is happening: ‘a story, perhaps, about the workings of nature’. Grant is well placed to tell such a
narrative. Since the 1950s he has travelled repeatedly to Norway (where he now lives), to Iceland, Greenland, the Tropics, and twice to Antarctica. Sir David Attenborough, in a catalogue essay from 1991, praised Grant’s ‘ability to convey the awesome mystery of nature at its most monumental and dramatic’, describing him as ‘one of the few painters whose artistic horizons have also expanded’. For those familiar with Grant’s work, there is a perceptible difference to The Last Ice, executed over a quietly focused period during the last fifteen months. It is as if he has, at last, been allowed to draw breath and exhale. These paintings, among the finest he has produced, are a deeply considered, impassioned homage to the North.
May, 2025
Judith LeGrove is a writer who has worked extensively with artists and their archives. Trained as a musicologist before completing a PhD on Geoffrey Clarke, she has published catalogues raisonnés and monographs on the work of Geoffrey Clarke, Michael Lyons, Keith Grant, Kenneth Draper and Egon Altdorf, and essays on Bryan Kneale, Jeremy Gardiner and the Britten–Pears art collection. She is currently researching sculpture in Derbyshire for a forthcoming volume in the ‘Public Sculpture of Britain’ series.
Aurora of the Transfigured Night 2021
Oil on linen | 150.5 × 130.5 cm
Literature
Keith Grant by Judith LeGrove, Lund Humphries, 2023 (Pl.95, illustrated p.115)
The Crescent of the Super-Moon, Approaching South Shetland, Evening 2018
Song at Sunrise 2018 Oil on linen | 115 × 132 cm
Literature
Keith Grant by Judith LeGrove, Lund Humphries, 2023 (Pl.138, illustrated p.164)
Last Ice, the Moon, the Milky Way and Stars (Last Ice Series) 2024 Oil on canvas | 100 × 140 cm
Marine Eruption 2015
Oil on canvas | 78.8 × 78.8 cm
Literature
Keith Grant by Judith LeGrove, Lund Humphries, 2023 (Pl.42, illustrated p.59)
‘I know of no painter who can convey the wonderful world of the Poles more vividly, accurately and thrillingly.’
Sir David Attenborough, 2018
Ice Antarctic Peninsula 2018
Oil on linen over board | 78 × 87 cm
Transfiguration 2015
Oil on canvas | 100.3 × 200.8 cm
Literature
Keith Grant by Judith LeGrove, Lund Humphries, 2023 (Pl.145, illustrated p.172)
‘His achievement is to have extended our sense of what landscape might encompass.’
Larry Berryman (extract from catalogue essay in Ice and Fire: Paintings by Keith Grant, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 1994)
Studies from Imagination. Northern Maritime Cacophony 2013
Literature
(Pl.113, illustrated p.134 and on book cover)
Last Ice, Horizon and Milky Way (Last Ice Series)
Oil on canvas | 87.5 × 147.5 cm
Literature
Keith Grant by Judith LeGrove, Lund Humphries, 2023 (Pl.4, illustrated p.12)
Biography
1930 Born 10 August, Liverpool
1948–50 National Service, RAF
1950–58 Studied at Working Men’s College, St Pancras (1950–52); Willesden School of Art (1952–5); Royal College of Art (1955–8)
1956–61 Married to Valerie Owen
1957 First visit to Norway
1964–96 Married to Gisèle Barka Djouadi
1971 Daughter, Dominique, born
1974 Son, Paul, born (died 1995)
1996 Settled in Norway
2000 Married Hilde Ellingsen. Together they have a daughter, Thea
Teaching
1958–60 Kingston School of Art
1961–2 Gravesend School of Art
1962–3 Goldsmiths’ College of Art
1963–8 Lecturer, Hornsey College of Art
1968–71 Head of Fine Art Department, Maidstone
1971 Byam Shaw School
1971 St Martin’s School of Art
1973–5 Gulbenkian Award Artist-in-Residence, Bosworth College, Leicester
1975–9 Camberwell School of Art and St Martin’s School of Art
1979–81 Head of Painting Department, Newcastle Polytechnic
1981–90 Head of Department of Art, Roehampton Institute
Selected Exhibitions
(Solo and Two-Person Exhibitions)
1955 A Student’s Progress, Bootle Art Gallery
1960 New Art Centre, London
1962
New Art Centre, London
1964 New Art Centre, London
1965 Galleria Montenapoleone, Milan (with John Grome)
1966 New Art Centre, London
1967
The North Lands, Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London
1969 Paintings of the North, Geffrye Museum, London
1970
1972
Recent Paintings of the Northlands, Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London
Recent Paintings, Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London
Paintings of Norway, Folkestone Arts Centre
1973 The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Scottish Arts Council Gallery, Edinburgh (and tour)
1974
1976
1977
Recent Paintings – Norway and Iceland, Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London
Loans and New Works, Folkestone Arts Centre
National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik
Aldeburgh Festival
Recent Paintings – Iceland and Ireland, Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London
The Way to Cold Mountain, Rochdale Art Gallery
The Paintings and Drawings of Keith Grant at Bosworth, Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery
The Volcano in the North, Portsmouth Museum & Art Gallery
Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London
1978 Town Hall, Svolær, Lofoten Islands, Norway
1979 A Winter Journey, Browse & Darby, London
Landscapes of the North, Compass Gallery, Glasgow
Ibsenhuset, Skien, Norway
1980 Polytechnic Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne
(touring to Loughborough College of Art and Design)
Keith Grant: Paintings, Metropole Arts Centre, Folkestone
The Festival of North Norway: Keith Grant, Harstad, Norway (with the British Council)
1981 The Sun, Browse & Darby, London
The Elements: Paintings of Iceland, Norway and England, Elizabethan Exhibition Gallery, Wakefield
City Art Gallery, Trondheim, Norway
1982 Solomon Gallery, Dublin
Yehudi Menuhin School
1983 Paintings from French Guiana, Logica Holdings Ltd, London
E.S.A. Pavilion, International Air Show, Le Bourget, Paris
1984 Recent Landscapes of England and South America, Browse & Darby, London
1985
1986
Paintings and Drawings of Sarawak, Francis Kyle Gallery, London
Between Two Extremes: Painting and drawings of French Guiana and Sarawak, Metropole Arts Centre, Folkestone
1987 Paintings of the North and the Tropics, Abbot Hall
Art Gallery, Kendal
Landscapes of the Frozen North, Francis Kyle Gallery, London
1988 Cadogan Contemporary, London
Touring exhibition to Alta, Tromsø, North Norway
1989 Cadogan Contemporary, London
1990 Paintings of the Arctic and the Desert, Crane Kalman Gallery, London
1991 Keith Grant, Artist in Residence: Recent Paintings, Roehampton Institute, London
1992 Recent Paintings: Rainforest and the Kaieteur Falls, Guyana; Arctic Night Skies, Gillian Jason Gallery, London
1993 Farther North: Paintings of the Arctic, The First Gallery, Southampton
1994 Ice and Fire, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Ice and Fire, Rocket Gallery, London
Glyndebourne Opera House
1995 Paintings and drawings, Cassian de Vere Cole, London
1996
Cadogan Contemporary, London
Cercle Munster, Luxembourg
Star Gallery, Lewes
1997 The Northern Element: Landscape Paintings, St John’s International School Art Gallery, Waterloo, Belgium
Malerier, Ibsenhuset, Skiens Kunstforening, Norway (supported by the British Council)
Galleri Amare, Stavanger, Norway
1998
2000
2003
Cadogan Contemporary, London
Haugesund Art Gallery, Norway
Recent Paintings, Cadogan Contemporary, London
Antarctica, Cadogan Contemporary, London
Antarctic Landscapes, Churchill College, Cambridge
2004 In Antarctica, Number Nine the Gallery, Birmingham
2005
2006
Recent Paintings, Cadogan Contemporary, London
Arctandria, Oslo, Norway
2006 Arctandria, Oslo, Norway
2008 Snow, Sea and Stars, Partridge Gallery, London
2010
2016
Galleri Arctandria, Oslo, Norway
Elements of the Earth, Chris Beetles Gallery, London
Metamorphosis, Chris Beetles Gallery, London
2017 North by New English, Chris Beetles Gallery, London
2018
Antarctica, Chris Beetles Gallery, London
2020 Invention and Variation, Chris Beetles Gallery, London
2022 Visions of Nature, Biodiversum, Luxembourg
2023
2024
One-man exhibition and book launch at Osborne Samuel Gallery, London
Retrospective exhibition, The Atkinson, Southport
Group Exhibitions
1954 Young Contemporaries, Royal Society of British Artists, London (and Arts Council tour)
Six Young Contemporaries and Hubert Dalwood, Gimpel Fils, London
Thirty Contemporary Paintings, Arts Council (tour)
1955 Daily Express Young Artists’ Exhibition, New Burlington Galleries, London
1957 Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London
1958
1959
1960
Young Contemporaries, Royal Society of British Artists, London (and Arts Council tour, 1959)
Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London
St. Pancras Artists, St Pancras Festival, St Pancras
Town Hall, London
Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London
September Selection, New Art Centre, London
Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London
1960 Contemporary Painting and Sculpture for Leicestershire Schools, Arts Council (tour)
1961 Spring Exhibition, Bradford City Art Gallery
London Group, RBA Galleries, London
1962 Keith Grant, Terry Lee, Donald Pass. Pictures for Offices, New Art Centre, London Towards Art?, RCA, London
1965 Contemporary Drawings and Watercolours, New Art Centre, London
St Pancras Artists, St Pancras Town Hall, London
Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London
1968 25 Camden Artists, 1968 Camden Festival, Central Library, Swiss Cottage, London
Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Camden Studios, London; proceeds to Medical Aid Committee for Vietnam
Sculpture Exhibition: City of London Festival
1969 Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London
1970 Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London
Kinetics, Hayward Gallery, London
1971 British Paintings and Drawings, Roland, Browse & Delbanco
1972 Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London
1973 Peter Coker; Alfred Cohen; Keith Grant; Barbara Tribe, Fieldborne Galleries, London
1974 Ludlow Festival
1976 The Roland Collection, Camden Arts Centre, London
1980 Festival of North Norway, Harstad, Norway
1983 Pintura británica contemporánea, Museo Municipal, Madrid
Modern Art and Nature, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
1986 The Ridgeway, Swindon Art Gallery
1987 Susan Foster; Keith Grant; Bill Wilkinson; Don Wilkinson, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal
1989 Ten Contemporary Scottish Painters, Thackeray Gallery, London
Images of Paradise, for Survival International, Harewood House, Leeds
The Late Dr Guy Howard’s Collection, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal
1995 SPENN, Sortland, North Norway
1996 Kunstnerhuset, Sortland, North Norway
2000 Summer Exhibition, Haugesund Art Gallery, Norway
2010 Volcano, Compton Verney, Warwickshire
2022 London Art Fair
2025 Magma Rising, Science and Art Event at the Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge
Public Commissions
1957 Murals for Verulamium Museum, St Albans (destroyed)
1959
Mural for Rhodesia House, London (destroyed)
Shell Guide to Wiltshire
1961 Shell Guide to Cardiganshire and Breconshire
1962 Shell Guide to Shetland
1964 Mural for Silver Springs Hotel, Cork (destroyed)
1965 Stage designs for Ingmar Bergman’s A Painting on Wood and The City, LAMDA, London
1970 Idomeneo (Arts Council grant)
1971 St Joan, Shaw Theatre, Euston Road
1972 Mural for Middlesex Hospital (destroyed)
1975 Mural for Charing Cross Hospital, London
1977 Stage designs for Salomé, Collegiate Theatre, London
1980 Mosaic for Charing Cross Hospital, London
1981 Mosaic for Gateshead Metro (two further mosaics, 1982–3)
Stage designs for Hamlet, Young Vic, London
1994 Stained-glass window dedicated to J.B. Priestley and Jacquetta Hawkes, Belle Vue Boys’ School, Bradford
1999/2000 Stained-glass windows for Charing Cross Hospital
2004 Altarpiece for Kopervik Church, Karnøy, Norway (destroyed)
Public Collections
Abbot Hall Gallery, Kendal; Alfred East Art Gallery, Kettering; All Souls College, University of Oxford; Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario; Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre; Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport; Beaverbrook Foundation, New Brunswick; Borough of Camden Council; Britten–Pears Foundation, Aldeburgh; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Government Art Collection; Hatton Gallery, Newcastle; Haugesund Art Gallery, Norway; Imperial College of Science and Technology, London; Imperial Health Charity Art Collection; Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum; Leicestershire County Council Artworks Collection; Manchester City Art Gallery; National Gallery, Guyana; National Gallery of Iceland; National Gallery of New South Wales; Museum of New Zealand | Te Papa Tongarewa; New Cross Hospital, Wolverhampton; North Lincolnshire Museums Service; Portsmouth Museums & Visitor Services; Royal College of Art; Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich; Touchstones, Rochdale; Towner, Eastbourne; Trondheim City Art Gallery, Norway; University of Birmingham; University of Surrey; Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Published to coincide with the exhibition
Keith Grant: The Last Ice 4 June to 4 July 2025
© The artist, the authors and The Redfern Gallery, London
Essay:
© Judith LeGrove
Photography:
Alex Fox (all works unless stated)
Anne Purkiss (inside front and inside back cover; p. 2; pp. 38-39; p. 75; p. 76)
Douglas Atfield (p. 49)
Design:
Graham Rees Design
Print: Gomer Press
Published by The Redfern Gallery, London 2025
ISBN: 978-0-948460-95-1
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying recording or any other information storage or retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the gallery.
front cover (illus. p. 21)
The Stillness of the Arctic Night (Last Ice Series) 2024 Oil on canvas | 61 × 50 cm
20 Cork Street, London W1S 3HL
+44 (0)20 7734 1732
info@redfern-gallery.com redfern-gallery.com
Mon-Fri 11am to 5:30pm Sat 11am to 2pm
An Appreciative Note
In the mid 1960s I began exhibiting my work at Roland Browse & Delbanco, a gallery in Cork Street, London, next door to the Redfern, with only a dividing wall between them.
Today the Redfern continues to occupy the same premises in Cork Street and is, as it was in the 1960s, my favourite venue for seeing the work of contemporary British artists.
I remember the Redfern’s show of John Minton’s Caribbean paintings. It was a revelation of jewel-like sensual tropical colour which still lives in my visual memory.
In the early 60s I saw Patrick Procktor’s first show at the Redfern which also made a long-lasting and wonderful impression.
However, perhaps the most influential and creative personal experience I gained from a Redfern exhibition was that of the early paintings of Alan Reynolds which still enriches my approach to landscape. Here I must admit that my admiration of the Redfern Gallery and its artists was accompanied by a prevailing wish to become one of them.
Now, in my 95th year, that wish has been realized and I am not embarrassed to admit the same excitement as I would have felt had this happened much earlier in my career.
I would like to thank most sincerely Richard Gault and Richard Selby, the two directors of the Redfern, for offering me the opportunity to hold an exhibition in their iconic gallery.
My deepest thanks must go to Judith LeGrove who has at short notice written the introductory essay for the catalogue of my show. Judith’s quality as a writer on art and music is well known and admired. I am immensely proud to be the subject of her interest and support both in respect of my first Redfern exhibition and the splendid monograph Judith wrote on my work which was recently published by Lund Humphries.
Finally, I am deeply indebted to the poet, artist/collagist, art critic and writer on art and artists, Andrew Lambirth, for his unfailing support and advice. He has maintained a correspondence with me that is both inspirational and creative. No artist could have a more considerate and approachable friend, an assertion which I know is shared by all who know and profoundly respect him.
Keith Grant, Norway, May 2025
