About the Book:

I think painting has to be more – much, much more – than about paint. There has to be a vision and a voice, a feeling that is as much about ideas and emotions as sensual visual experience. KEN CURRIE

Ken Currie: Paintings and Writings provides a unique insight into the thought-world of Ken Currie’s challenging and enigmatic art. For over four decades Currie has created some of the most confrontational and intriguing paintings in the contemporary art world.

For the first time, Currie has made available his studio journals. The result is a fascinating dialogue that explores the motives and aspirations of his inscrutable paintings.

Compiled and edited by the art historian Tom Normand, this book penetrates the creative imagination of a truly visionary artist.

Reviews:

Ken Currie: Paintings and Writings intimately relates the artist's worldview to his art through each phase of its evolution. ... Currie's writings range from commentary on the creation of individual paintings to his personal responses to political upheaval, war and humanitarian disaster around the world. ... a stimulating dialogue between the visual and the verbal on every page. Currie's art is beautifully reproduced in full colour, charting his work from early paintings commemorating the massacre of the Calton Weavers to his artistic response to war; he addresses corruption, both physical and moral, with the honesty and courage that is also exemplified in his medical portraits. ART PLUGGED

This book meshes the journals and thoughts of one of the country’s foremost artists with examples of their work. Together they help the reader build an appreciation of what he wants to say, and how/why his art has developed as it has. A fascinating book I’d recommend to all art lovers. RB, Scottish Field

Praise for Ken Currie:

It is getting hard for artists to shock anyone... Ken Currie deserves credit for breaking through this moribund mood with grotesque new paintings that genuinely nauseate. JONATHAN JONES, The Guardian

Ken Currie belongs in a great and distinctively Scottish imaginative tradition... He is a master of the business of painting, of hand and eye, but he does not stop at that. He uses his command of his means profoundly to comment on the world and cast some illumination in its dark places. DUNCAN MACMILLAN, The Scotsman