Transience Captured: The Life and Art of Kenneth Draper

My overall desire is to make self contained worlds which simultaneously pay homage to, and express the power of nature in all its transient yet piercing beauty. Kenneth Draper, Menorca 2012 Whether he is working as a painter or sculptor, this artist celebrates the natural world, and especially those parts of it on which man has left memorable marks. Although aware of the prevailing concepts and fashions within the international world of art, Draper has serenely trod his own path, well clear of an art world "in whose overlit shallows thin voices are heard proclaiming their own emptiness to be a "new development", as the Australian - born writer Robert Hughes has put it". Indeed, the British art historian Francis Spalding believes that Drapers very lack of associations has helped him to earn "a fixed and lasting place in British art" His generosity of spirit, his energy and his love of life are reflected in his work. Amid so much art that is glib, meretricious and spiritually empty, Draper is producing work that ravishes the eye and nourishes the soul. Roger Berthoud, "Transience Captured" The Life and Art of Kenneth Draper. As viewers we can hardly follow the line of Draper's thoughts along all the channels of his imagination, but we can wonder at the results, at the daring attempt to solidify wind, the colour of throbbing heat, the ambiguity of half light, the sensation of a wisp of air or the experience of being under water. His feelings are induced by his involvement with his work, and by his passionate response to the island. The reality of the landscape remains an important source of inspiration but his constantly stated intention is to transcend it. Judith Bumpus, Catalogue for Royal Academy Exhibition, London.