Keith Grant

Keith Grant (b. 1930, Liverpool) is a British landscape painter whose work has been shaped by a lifelong engagement with remote and elemental environments. Although best known for paintings of Norway, Iceland, Greenland and Antarctica, his subjects have also included tropical forests, deserts, volcanoes, the sea and the night sky. Across these different landscapes, he has remained particularly interested in light, weather, geological form and the changing character of the natural world.

Grant left school at thirteen and worked for a period at the local Co-operative Society before completing National Service in the RAF. Classes at the Working Men’s College in Camden led to his enrolment at Willesden School of Art from 1952 to 1955, followed by the Royal College of Art from 1955 to 1958, where he was awarded a silver medal for mural painting.

His fascination with the North began early. As a child in Liverpool he was struck by the sight of dockyard cranes encrusted with ice in winter and developed an enduring interest in snow, cold and the origins of weather. He first visited Norway in the 1950s and returned repeatedly, while Iceland became another major source of imagery. By the time of his 1967 exhibition The North Lands at Roland Browse & Delbanco, paintings of volcanoes, fjords, avalanches and the midnight sun had already established the northern landscape as a central subject in his work.

Grant’s travels have extended far beyond Scandinavia. He has worked in French Guiana, Sarawak, Cameroon, the Negev Desert, Venezuela and Greenland, and travelled twice to Antarctica. In 2001 he was selected, with Philip Hughes, to help inaugurate the British Antarctic Survey’s Artists and Writers Programme, spending time at Rothera Research Station and remote field sites on the Antarctic Peninsula. These journeys generated drawings, paintings and journals which continued to inform his work long after his return.

A recurring feature of Grant’s practice is the transformation of observed landscape through memory. His paintings rarely correspond directly to a single place; instead, rocks, trees, coastlines, ice, sky and light are reconfigured from accumulated experience. Recent works have become increasingly structured by geometric forms, particularly triangles, which he associates with the sharply defined forms of glaciated northern terrain.

Another long-running strand of his work is The Narrow Road to the Deep North, inspired by Matsuo Bashō’s seventeenth-century travel diary. Grant first developed the series in the early 1970s, mapping Bashō’s journey onto locations in Norway and combining luminous watercolour with handwritten inscriptions. He returned to the theme decades later, extending it through new paintings and works on paper.

Trees also recur throughout Grant’s work, especially birch, which he has described as a symbol of resistance and survival. More broadly, his landscapes often avoid the human figure, allowing trees, coastlines, beacons, buildings and other traces of habitation to suggest human presence indirectly.

Alongside his work as a painter, Grant taught for many years, including as Head of Painting at Maidstone College of Art and later Head of Art at Roehampton Institute of Higher Education. He has also undertaken public commissions in mural painting, stained glass, sculpture and mosaic.

Grant settled permanently in Gvarv, Telemark, Norway, in 1996. From there he has continued to paint the landscapes, skies and changing conditions of the North, while drawing increasingly on memory and earlier journeys.

Major exhibitions have included Fire and Ice at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in 1994; Elemental Nature: Keith Grant at The Atkinson, Southport, in 2024–25; and Keith Grant: The Last Ice at The Redfern Gallery in 2025. Sir David Attenborough has praised Grant’s “ability to convey the awesome mystery of nature at its most monumental and dramatic”.

Grant’s work is held in public collections including the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the Government Art Collection, the Contemporary Art Society and The Atkinson, Southport.

Keith Grant is represented by The Redfern Gallery.