Published by Three Highgate Editions; distributed by Shearsman Books
Published 2024. Hardcover, full-colour edition, 24pp, 9.25 x 7.5ins, £16 / $27.50
ISBN 9781739544911

This volume offers a number of full-colour reproductions of works by the artist Ken Kiff (1935–2001) together with poems that spring from a similar source of inspiration.

Three poems by Mayakovsky, Frank O’Hara and Ken Kiff’s close friend Martha Kapos shed light on the way Kiff, like Paul Klee before him, took a line for a walk, and then another line, and then yet another. Kapos’ poem was inspired by A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island by Frank O’Hara, which in turn was written in jealous awe after reading Mayakovsky’s An Extraordinary Adventure Which Befell Vladimir Mayakovsky in a Summer Cottage .

Kiff uses paint as the poets use words – pushing his blocks of colour together, shifting them around until they blur and rhyme. His exploitation of complementary colour is second to none. Yet as with poets, the technique and understanding of the language are but tools to reach another place. ‘Fantasy,’ he said, ‘is a way of thinking about reality.’

Kiff made specific paintings in homage to poetry including the 1985 canvas, The Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky Invites the Sun to Tea, 1985–7 (see opposite), but more importantly he had similar aspirations in his art to poetry. He would agree with Gaston Bachelard’s dictum that ‘The poet does not describe, he exalts.’ Kiff needs to depict ‘A hundred suns in one sunset.’ Kiff was an intellectual, with endless nagging doubts. He was always questioning, and his reasoning was byzantine, circuitous, forever probing, but when it came down to the paintings, he managed to conjure up those hundred in one. Not that this stopped him doubting himself, which is why he embarked on the Sequence, as one painting is never enough.

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