Roger Kemp

Francis Roderick Kemp OBE AO (Eaglehawk, 3 July 1908 - Melbourne 14 September 1987), known as Roger, was one of Australia's foremost practitioners of transcendental abstraction. Kemp developed a system of symbols and motifs which were deployed in his non-figurative paintings so as to reveal cosmic mysteries, striving in particular to explain man's place in a universal order.

Youth

Francis Roderick Kemp was born on 3 July 1908, in California Gully, Eaglehawk. His father, Frank Kemp, worked at a gold mine, and his mother, Rebecca Kemp, raised the family. Both the Kemp's and Harvey's were devout Methodists and proud Cornish people. In 1913 the family moved to Melbourne after a mining accident. In late February 1920 Roger's father was struck by a tram and was pronounced dead on arrival. Roger was 12 years old.[1]

Work

At twenty-one Kemp took his first formal steps to becoming an artist by taking classes in drawing at the National Gallery Art School in stationed next to the National Gallery of Victoria. In 1932 Kemp enrolled into the Working Men's College.

Critical Acclaim

“To many people Roger Kemp appears as a hermit, painting out his spiritual drama away from the world, removing himself both as man and painter. Nothing could be more misleading. No hermit ever affirmed the world with such passionate intensity as Kemp. His paintings grow out of his responses to the living world of experience around him and he paints, sometimes desperately in his isolation, to share and communicate his joyous apprehension of the world” - Patrick McCaughey

"His glimpses of the ineffable are translated to us in terms of dancing, for his painting are a never extravagant. It has the formal quality of a sarabande. Every moment, every gesture, every brushstroke becomes part of a ritual. There is exuberance, but it is controlled by a aesthetic etiquette as precise as the protocol of the Hapsburg court" - James Gleeson

Legacy

Roger Kemp was perhaps the most celebrated Australian abstractionist in his lifetime, however his place in Australian art has remain comparatively unexplored posthumously. In recent year Dame Elisabeth Murdoch commissioned several tapestries of some of Kemp's most prominent pieces. They hang in the great hall of the National Gallery of Victoria under the stain-glassed ceiling created by Kemp's contemporary Leonard French.


References

  1. ↑ Christopher Heathcote, The Quest for Enlightenment: The Art of Roger Kemp, 2007

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