User:WatsonWorks

Cozens, Kenneth (1920-2001)

One of the most talented and prolific painters of North-East Britain. Largely self-taught, Cozens was for many years curator of the Middlesbrough Art Gallery. His work is to be found in a number of public and private collections, including the new Museum of International Art on Teesside.

          Kenneth Cozens was essentially a painter of landscapes, observed intensely, rendered in the kind of detail which arrests the viewer as though seeing the magic in the commonplace for the very first time. For Cozens, rocks and sky, sheer cliffs and sea, combined to convey the power of myth. Where the human figure did feature in harsh but brilliant landscapes, it was with a sense of awe: against the backdrop of nature's strength and timelessness, human life seems to be not only scaled down to the almost insignificant, but often in conflict with it. 

          . Even in Cozens' figurative work, such as Drowned Girl (1964) or Ophelia (1974), nature is in command, the figures steeped in the flow of sky and shore-reflecting water. The fascination is in the way nature and humanity interact, producing artefacts that are both a close scrutiny of the structures, colours and textures of nature and at the same time possessing symbolic quality. 

          Cozens' sunflower series, for example - a theme returned to again and again by the artist over a number of decades - contain a passion which surges out of the canvases in almost a frightening way: the sunflower turns against the sun, against its own nature, though it cannot escape its own decay. Thus the torment one senses in Dying Sunflower, a watercolour of 1963, returns in a 1981 version, the flower's glory all gone, as if the onset of human old age was being summarised in this one, vibrant image. 

          The fascination is symbolic, yes, but it yields to the aesthetic as illustrated in Sunflower (1998), where the detail of subject and background is closely and sensually observed in the many-hued yellow petals and the deep richness of the leaves. 

          Pembrokeshire was a spiritual home for the artist, and it is appropriate that one of his last works, in charcoal and watercolour, is Fallen Cliff, St. Bride's Pembrokeshire (1999). Here the artist pays microscopic attention to the details of rock faces, their variegated surfaces reflecting light from the sea; the colours of tide and cliff-face seemingly mingling as though shot through with the same spirit of wonder, yet at the same time, of impersonality.