Major Ken White exhibition

Winsor Birch, which has The Little gallery is at 1 The Parade, says its selling exhibition is the first major retrospective devoted to the painter and muralist, who died on Christmas Eve last year.
The exhibition features more than 60 works spanning six decades, from rediscovered 1970s studio pieces to the landscapes of his final years, alongside the murals and public commissions that put his work among the most widely seen in Britain.
A gallery spokesperson said: "Ken White: A Retrospective is a selling exhibition of paintings, drawings, watercolours and prints, including significant rediscoveries from the artist's own studio. 
"It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with a foreword, Sliding Doors, by Grant Ford, of Winsor Birch, who became a friend of White's in the final year of his life and has since been asked by the artist's children to look after their father's work and legacy."
Ken White was born in Swindon in 1943 into a family bound to the Great Western Railway for three generations. He left school at 15 to work in the Works himself, heating rivets in the riveting shop before transferring into the signwriting department, where he learned the trade in gold leaf and stencil that would shape everything he later painted. 
The spokesperson said: "It was an apprenticeship in a guild tradition of craftsmen who took a commission, worked it to the scale the wall demanded, and moved on without signing their name — and it is a tradition White followed for the rest of his working life.
"That grounding carried him first into London's music and underground press, where in the early 1970s he painted cover portraits of David Bowie, Alice Cooper and Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson for Cream magazine, and contributed a striking nude rendering of The Beatles to Alan Aldridge's celebrated illustrated edition of the band's lyrics. 
"It carried him back to Swindon in the late 1970s and 1980s, where he led a state-supported movement to reclaim the town's blank walls for public painting — among more than a hundred murals, his 1979 Swindon Personalities mural gathered the town's famous sons and daughters, including Diana Dors, whose inclusion so troubled one councillor that the work was held up until the committee relented."
From 1984, Ken White worked for two decades on retainer to Richard Branson, painting murals, aircraft liveries and hoardings for Virgin from Amsterdam to Los Angeles and Vienna to Vigo. 
His public commissions include a 60ft faux-Georgian terrace painted for Lord Rothschild on the blank flank of the Royal Opera House, and the fuselage artwork for Virgin Atlantic's Maiden Japan. 
Richard Branson has described him as "...one of the most extraordinary, creative artists of our time."
Details of the exhibition can be found at www.winsorbirch.com
 

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