|  Hugh
Kemp was born in York in 1927 where his father was a Civil Servant.
However most of his childhood holidays were spent on his grandfather's
farm on the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds and these visits were
to be a great and happy influence on him.
He studied at the Birmingham College of Art from 1944 to 1945
when he left to do his National Service as a 'Bevan Boy', down
a coal mine in Staffordshire.
On his release he entered the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford where
he studied under Albert Rutherston. Hugh believed, as did so many
contemporary artists, that an artist's salvation was to develop
not only one's own style, but more importantly one's own language.
Visiting artists to the Ruskin in the late 1940's included Richard
Rowntree, John Minton, John Piper and Victor Pasmore. Pasmore
in particular, as a painter before the 2nd World War, had been
a leading member of the Euston Road group, whose members painted
highly realistic landscapes. As Pasmore grew older his landscapes
were slowly transformed into abstractions. Hugh believed at that
time and for several decades to come, that a personal style was
of greater importance than the subject matter.
Hugh's paintings from 1950 to the early 1960's show landscapes
broken into geometric patterns. Whilst living in East Kent at
Elmsted, he drew inspiration from the concrete breakwaters of
Hythe and Dungeness that had inspired Paul Nash between the two
wars. Dungeness, lying further to the west of Dymchurch, with
its endless banks of shingle and old railway carriages painted
with tar, provided many subjects for Hugh's semi-abstracted form.
In 1960 Hugh and his first wife moved to a Scottish island facing
the Atlantic. Here Hugh's paintings transformed the rock formations
into abstracted lines and shapes.
By 1965, Hugh was divorced, and he married Jane Crockett, whom
he had met as a student at the Ruskin.
After a brief spell in Kent, Hugh and Jane moved back to his native
North Yorkshire. They bought a hill farm in 1967, and since that
time have grown trees on 60-odd acres . In the early and middle
years, Christmas trees were grown for the wholesale trade, but
for the last ten years, the former commercial woodland business
has been geared towards woodland conservation and wildlife interests.
From the move to the Dales up until the late 1980s, Hugh's paintings
still remained abstractions with little conscious reference to
the surrounding steep fells and gulleys.
For the next two decades Hugh's painting continued to be highly
stylised abstactions of hillsides & plantlife. However in
the late eighties following a serious illness of Hugh's wife,
Jane, Hugh found the complex linear patterns of rock formations,
landscapes & vegetables in particular, so exciting that it
was no longer necessary to stylise or abstract objects when painting
nature. This is Hugh's aim that continues to the present time.
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