Keene Artists: 3 Generations of Painters

I suppose it began with my grandfather, Arthur Keene, although most people knew him as Van Art. He was a cartoonist, comedian, graphic artist and painter in Coventry during the war, making drawings about the Blitz and the people living through it. There was humour in them, but also a certain toughness. They were very much about the public moment—what was happening around him and how people managed to carry on.

My father, also Arthur, took things in a rather different direction. He was a proper painter, trained in Coventry and Birmingham, and worked mostly with the figure, portraiture and landscape. He had that traditional grounding and a great respect for drawing. I grew up with painting simply being there. It was not presented as anything particularly extraordinary; it was just what one did.

My own work has moved through a number of different bodies and themes over the years, and the figure has not always occupied the same kind of space. The Black Paintings, painted across 2025 and 2026, came much later, after several decades of painting. In these works, much of the surrounding information falls away. Movement is held, the gesture becomes more isolated, and the figure is left within a dark, suspended space. I am less interested in explaining who the person is, or what has just happened, than in holding the image there long enough for something less obvious to emerge.

So, across the three of us, there is perhaps a movement from the world outside, to the observed figure, and then towards something more internal. I would not say that was ever planned. It is simply the rather curious way a family inheritance has continued to change as it has passed from one generation to the next.