Kenneth Armitage | the artist

Armitage is obsessed with the human figure, yet he is at his most lyrical when talking about landscape. Indeed, in the broad, rough surfaces of earlier works like ‘The sentinels’ (1955-6) the connection with a powerful, wild Nature is almost tangible, reappearing in more distant, intellectualised form in recent works like ‘The Dagda’ (1995), inspired by Celtic mythology and the landscape of Ireland, and whose very name, he says, ‘inspires awe’.