With a successful career spanning more than forty years, Ron Kingswood is renowned for his distinctive paintings of animals in their natural habitats. With his gestural brushstrokes and a lifelong study of the outdoors, Kingswood’s work exists at the exciting intersection of naturalism, impressionism, and abstract expressionism. Offering a refreshing and iconoclastic approach to wildlife art, Kingswood stuns with his unexpected compositions and mastery of color. Using oil paint on canvas, he shapes a tangible sense of place–from bare minimalist snowscapes to dense woodland scenes. Each quiet moment allows the viewer an extraordinarily intimate glimpse into the unfettered and noble lives of the animal kingdom, inviting meditation about the preciousness of nature. In his lushly layered ecosystems, Kingswood’s equal emphasis on flora and fauna can be interpreted as a subtle act of environmentalism–urging humanity to actively consider, cherish, and conserve our planet’s declining biodiversity. Kingswood’s paintings can also be seen as an act of preservation–creating an indelible record of present-day species and landscapes for future generations to experience and enjoy. In both Kingswood’s canvases and in real life, the beauty of nature is fleeting. Born in St. Thomas, Ontario, in 1959, Ron Kingswood is internationally recognized for his achievements as a painter. Kingswood studied at H.B. Beal in London, Ontario, and received a degree in Bird Ecology and Ornithology at The University of Western Ontario. In 2022, he was awarded the Pittman Wildlife Award at the Prix de West International Art Exhibition at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, OK. His paintings have been exhibited internationally at both private and public galleries and museums. His work is included in many public collections, including: The National Museum of Wildlife Art, Wyoming; Foothills Art Center, Colorado; London Museum, Ontario, Canada; The Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Virginia; among others. He lives and works in Sparta, Ontario.

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Ron Kingswood reminds the viewer of his three great pleasures as an artist: his love of nature, his will to paint big and his fearless passion for challenging convention. But his monumental work— also speaks to something else: Kingswoodʼs emergence as a visionary after 15 years of working in none figurative abstraction, using wildlife as his inspiration.

Ron paints in a distinctly impressionistic style that is radically different from that of any other wildlife artist working today, his unusual composition, and his highly original approach to his subjects are influencing the evolution of animal art. Ronʼs work is an intimate response to nature, based upon his command of anatomy and his passion for the natural world.

Whether Kingswoodʼs work should be called pure impressionism or a variation of the kind of abstract expressionism pioneered by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning is open for debate. Whatʼs certain is that Kingswood [b1959], though still a relative youngster, is going his own way and turning heads.

Ronʼs paintings are exciting because he takes chances with negative space, he does a lot of things that casual viewers think are wrong, but he makes them work.

The beginning of Kingswoodʼs promising career now seems like ancient history, given the profundity of his transformation. During his teenage years, the southern Ontario native was enamored with the realistic paintings of Don Eckelberry, which frequently illustrated the pages of Audubon magazine. Kingswood, a birder since boyhood, obtained Eckelberryʼs address and began corresponding with the late avian master, who critiqued the young artistʼs work.

It was on Eckelberryʼs recommendation that Kingswood sought formal art training at the H.B. Beal Secondary School in London, Ontario. There he learned color theory and composition; in his second year he fell under the tutelage of Bert Kloezeman, who convinced Kingswood that natural history and fine art could be merged.

In 1978, while attending an exhibition at Beckett Gallery in Ontario, he discovered the works of fellow Canadian Robert Bateman. The acknowledged dean of modern wildlife painters, Bateman has inspired numerous protégés—including the impressionable Kingswood, who readily admits to emulating the master early in his career. But Bateman also encouraged Kingswood to pursue a fresh vision he could call his own and not to feel limited by “the rules” as others defined them. Today Kingswood remains an admirer of Batemanʼs realistic representations of wildlife, which have established the standard that many artists use for communicating the language of nature to the masses.

Kingswood achieved enormous commercial success with photorealistic works. Still, he could feel that spiritually something was missing. Eckelberry, his early mentor, advised him to resist the tightly rendered, highly illustrative approach that has trapped more than a few gifted nature painters and instead to always be attentive to draftsmanship and anatomy, which give the eye a foundation for comprehending the outside world. Eckelberry also pointed to the liberating example of Liljefors.

By the mid-1980s, the 20-something Kingswood was ready for a change. Rather than gradually shifting his style and medium, Kingswood turned to radical reduction, embracing the Chinese philosophy of stripping down a painting to its barest essentials. He identified, too, with the struggle of Henri Matisse, who abandoned Impressionism for abstraction in an effort to resolve the conflict between two and three dimensions.

Kingswood is not alone in his urgency to create. “Cezanne once said that he felt like the Hebrew who could see the Promised Land, but he knew he might not reach it in his lifetime,” Kingswood says. “I feel good about whatʼs happening because meaning in life, for me, comes from the journey. All Iʼm trying to do is be true to myself.”

Excerpts from an Article By Todd Wilkinson

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