Mural by William Kempster St Luke's CE Primary School, Cubit Town, Isle of Dogs, London.1952.
Kempster was a British artist (1914-96) who specialised in murals He also did one in the entrance of Heathrow airport when it first opened.
A painter, mural artist print-maker and illustrator, Kempster studied atthe Wimbledon School of Art under Gerald Cooper (1937-39), then at theRoyal College of Art (1939-42) where his teachers included Percy Jowett andErnest Tristram. Kempster's career included a great deal of exhibitionwork, and he undertook mural and poster commissions for, among others, theCentral Office of Information, Miner Comes to Town Exhibition, Health ofthe People Exhibition, Post Office Exhibition and the Festival of Britain1951, illustrating aspects of British life and work.
Thanks to Dominic Cullinan, SCABAL, for these images.
1 comment:
One of the issues with murals is of course how long they stay there. At the l ast school where I was head, in SOuth Australia, we spent a lot of time and money working with artists on a range of murals. I think we had about 16 of them inside and outside done over 12 years.. many were feminist and Indigenous arists and they were oriented to the local history and peoples. After I left the school the next person painted out all but two of them, as well as fenced in the yard, closed the native and endangered animal enclosure which had been there for 26 years and generally saw everything that these things symbolised as a problem. the question of whether he had the right to decide to do this for future generations of local children didnt seem to enter his head.
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