Curator Talk Sliding Doors: The Hidden Life of Ken White

For fifty years, millions of people saw Ken White's work without ever knowing his name. He painted illusions onto the sides of aircraft, his masterpieces adorned city walls and gave Richard Branson's Virgin fleet its most famous figure, the ‘Scarlett Lady’. Born into a Swindon railway family and trained as a boy in the signwriting sheds of the Great Western Works, White spent his public career as a master of trompe l'oeil, tricking the eye on gable ends and fuselages around the world. But alongside that very public work, he kept a private one: unsigned, unseen paintings of the riveters, streets, and chapels of the working town he never left, painted with none of the illusion that made him famous.

This talk brings the two halves of White's career together for the first time, tracing how a Swindon-born apprentice became one of the last practitioners of a nearly vanished craft and asking what it means for an artist's most public work to also be his most anonymous.

The tall will last 45-60 minutes with time for questions with the curator afterwards.

This talk is given by Grant Ford, founder of Winsor Birch, in conjunction with Ken White: A Retrospective, currently showing at The Little Gallery in Marlborough.