Sentinel X, 2003

Ian McKeever RA (b. 1946)

RA Collection: Art

This is one of McKeever’s 'Sentinel' group of paintings (2003-5), which were first exhibited at the Alan Cristea Gallery in 2004.

In Sentinel X, the artist explores effects of translucency and opacity, light and darkness, things delicate and powerful, near and distant. The finest membranes of colour appear to fold in on themselves, as if opening or closing around an inner light source that seems to emanate from the centre, the whole floating on a pool of black.

The title ‘Sentinel’ implies a state of watching and waiting. McKeever has written: ‘Paintings stand still before our eyes. In looking at paintings the task is not to understand them, nor to read meaning into them, but to accept them as experience, to ‘be’ with them and begin from there.’ [Ian McKeever, ‘Painting is not a Flat Art’, from In Praise of Painting – Three Essays (University of Brighton, 2005) based upon three lectures delivered at the University of Brighton and Cambridge University].

McKeever has also spoken of his desire that, in an age where the impact of digitalised imagery is often little more than the visual equivalent of the fast-food industry, painting might yet return both maker and viewer to a slower, deeper, even replenishing experience of temporality: ‘In painting a painting one does not set out to paint what one knows, but rather tries to touch those things which one does not know and perhaps cannot be known. Implicit in the unknown and what we cannot know about paintings, is a stillness and silence. Our lives are now flooded with images which remorselessly bombard us with what we ‘should’ know, and which steal our time. Perhaps one of the things which paintings can do for us, if we are prepared to be still in front of them, is to give us back our own sense of time and the independence which goes with it.’ [Ian McKeever, ‘Painting is not a Flat Art’, from In Praise of Painting – Three Essays, published by University of Brighton, 2005; based upon three lectures delivered at the University of Brighton and Cambridge University].

At the beginning of the twenty-first century McKeever was also working on his Four Quartets, a series of sixteen paintings divided into four groups (corresponding with T.S. Eliot’s series of poems). The 'Sentinel' paintings (and their corresponding works on paper) relate to the 'Here' group from the Four Quartets. Equally in the way that an inner light seems to radiate out from the paintings, the 'Sentinel' paintings form part of a clear development from McKeever’s earlier 'Door' paintings to the 'Sentinel' and 'Here' groups, which all manifest this quality.