Kenneth B. Walsh

June 11, 2020

To pair with Whalebone's Throwback Issue that came out Memorial Day weekend 2019, the magazine featured a short retrospective in the form of a photo gallery and a short personal, reflective piece written by Kenneth B. Walsh's Walsh's son, Christopher Walsh. The retrospective was titled "Back in the Day" and the images showed Ken setting up shop and hanging around Gosman’s + Hither Hills. 

May 25, 2020

May 25, 2020—A pandemic can’t stop Karyn Mannix Contemporary. The gallerist and curator is hosting regular themed exhibitions in the spring of 2020, and for the current show “The Body As Form” chose an eye-popping 10 original works by Kenneth B. Walsh, who created each of the acrylic-on-canvas painting in his Montauk, N.Y. studio in the mid-1970s.

Walsh’s paintings, including “Blue Watusi,” “Golden Girl,” “Eve,” “Ethiopian Girl,” and “Midnight Rendezvous pour Trois,” are among the most colorful and abstract offerings in “The Body As Form. The exhibition is at www.karynmannixcontemporary.com/the-body-as-form.

Christopher Walsh is the archivist and director of the Bonart Studio, his father’s commercial and fine art business that thrived in Manhattan and Montauk in the 1960s and ‘70s. After a years-long effort to compile, restore, document and exhibit his father’s work, he has held several exhibitions of the collection, makes select paintings available for sale, and offers reproductions of original work and licensing of images. The collection is at www.kennethbwalshart.com.

January 25, 2020

SPRINGS, NEW YORK—Karyn Mannix, artist and curator of the annual Love & Passion art show, chose an abstract, acrylic painting by Kenneth B. Walsh for the 2020 show in Springs, the Hamptons hamlet celebrated as the home of painters including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

Walsh (1922-1980), founder of the Bonart Studio in Manhattan and the Bonart Gallery in Montauk, N.Y., was an acclaimed artist known for evocative watercolor paintings depicting the South Fork of Long Island in the 1960s and a bold, modernist style in the 1970s, the latter including the iconic “Montauk” painting.

Contact: chris@kennethbwalshart.com

February 09, 2019

EAST HAMPTON, N.Y.—When Kenneth B. Walsh’s son Christopher set out to compile, document, and exhibit his father’s mid-20th century paintings, he had little idea that in the process he would find and recover several original works.

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But that is what has happened, and early in 2019 it has happened again. The younger Mr. Walsh, of East Hampton, New York, announces the acquisition of Abstract II, a modernist acrylic-on-canvas work created circa 1976 in Montauk, New York.

The artist (1922-1980) sold innumerable works throughout his lifetime, both at his Bonart Gallery at Gosman’s Dock in Montauk and privately to collectors. A Montauk collector, originally from Norway, purchased Abstract II soon after its creation. The owner recently passed away, and Abstract II made its way to the Wallace Gallery in East Hampton. Terry Wallace, the gallery’s proprietor, informed Christopher Walsh of both the painting’s whereabouts and its availability. Mr. Walsh quickly acquired the painting, which has not been seen publicly in more than 40 years.

Abstract II (45 x 34.75 inches) is among a select collection of original work that Christopher Walsh is making available to collectors. Reproductions of the artist’s work are also available. 

Ken Walsh, a successful commercial artist in 1950s and ‘60s New York City, painted in Montauk, New York, throughout the ‘60s and 70s, amassing a body of work comprising watercolor and oil paintings depicting the natural beauty of the land and sea, and those who worked it; as well as an abstract, modernist style, as illustrated by works such as Abstract II. He also worked in collage, often using driftwood and other found objects on the beaches of Montauk.

Christopher Walsh, a writer and musician, set out to compile, document, restore, and exhibit his father’s work, an effort that has now spanned more than a decade and resulted in multiple exhibitions on the East End of Long Island, including at Woodbine Collection in Montauk, the White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton, the Amagansett Library, and, in 2019, East Hampton Town Hall, where some dozen works comprising watercolors, an oil painting, an abstract modernist work, and the “Montuk” map created in the 1960s are presently on view.

Ken Walsh’s life and work are illustrated at www.kennethbwalshart.com. His son, Christopher Walsh, is managing director of The Bonart Studio.

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​Contact: Christopher Walsh, chris@kennethbwalshart.com

January 03, 2019

A decade ago, Christopher Walsh found himself in a New England attic, unrolling a dozen paintings by a man he barely knew.

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There were nautical watercolor scenes of fishermen and boats, reminiscent of his childhood summers spent in Montauk. He peered at strikingly different, modernist oils, and wondered what caused the shift.

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What his father — artist Kenneth B. Walsh — had been thinking.

“There’s such a distinct change, or evolution, from the 1960s watercolor stuff, which depicts a lot of local scenery, to the 1970s abstract stuff,” Christopher Walsh said. “It almost seems like a different person has painted it.”

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Today, this art serves as his only clue, and Walsh is determined to find as much as he can. A years-long search for his father’s lost paintings has recently accelerated, leading him up and down the East Coast, and beyond, to bring the collection together — a selection currently on view at East Hampton Town Hall.

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“I’m not an art critic. I’m not a student of art, so I don’t know where this all fits in,” Walsh said. “That’s for the world to decide. Just to be known, and to be respected for what he did, is my goal.”

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Now a reporter for The East Hampton Star, Walsh first wrote a letter to the local newspaper in February 2012, soliciting help to locate his father’s paintings. To his surprise, the response was immediate and swift, and he quickly found two paintings at the Montauk School, and one at Gosman’s Dock.

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His pursuit has extended far beyond the East End, from Westchester and Nashville to cities farther south in Georgia and Florida, where he reunited with relatives and finally became acquainted with those who know his father better, or at least longer, than he did.

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“Through speaking with family members, who are older than me and knew him longer than I did, I did get a more complete picture of this evolution of him as an artist, and just came to know him better, as well,” Walsh said of his father. “This thing has snowballed, but in slow motion. I’ve learned about a bunch of work that I didn’t know existed, and actually acquired them, as well — which is really, really fulfilling.”

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One of nine children, Kenneth B. Walsh grew up in Depression-era Boston, hunting and fishing in the Fells to help his ailing father provide for a large and growing family. In his early 20s, he served as the co-pilot of a B-17 “Flying Fortress” during the last years of World War II in Europe.

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“As I became a young adult, when I was 22 or so, it dawned on me that, wow, he was in Europe co-piloting a plane getting shot at by the Germans, at the age that I am now,” Walsh said, “which gave me a lot of respect for him. Once you’ve done that, it’s hard to imagine anything scaring you anymore.”

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In the early 1960s, Kenneth Walsh — now the successful businessman behind Bonart Studio in New York — built a house in Montauk and began to depict the area’s natural beauty in watercolor paintings, exhibiting and selling them at the Bonart Gallery at Gosman’s Dock. Over time, he delegated more of his commercial art studio’s work to employees, spending time at home in Hither Hills with his family.

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Their walls were filled with his watercolor and acrylic paintings, and collages from driftwood he found while beachcombing. He loved to sing and fish and drive his Jeep along the dunes. He could create something out of anything, his son said.

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“We used to have these wonderful parties on the beach on summer nights,” he said. “We’d drive way down to Shagwong Point in Montauk with a whole bunch of food, and the kids would run around and play and swim, and the adults would drink a lot of wine and cook. It was great. It was just great. You could not ask for a happier childhood.”

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It was not to last, Walsh said. In 1971, the artist’s bipolar disorder manifested and destroyed his business, and the family of seven moved full-time to Montauk. He slept most of the time, weighed down by heavy medication, but finally began to paint again when his depression lifted a few years later.

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“That was when the new style emerged, and he was painting one right after the other for a few years, in the modernist style,” his son recalled. “My mom said he could be so driven that he would work for 16 to 18 hours at a stretch.”

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By 1980, his illness had reared its ugly head once again, as did bone cancer, and Kenneth Walsh died at age 58 on September 5, 1980, in a Veteran’s Administration hospital in Brockton, Massachusetts, just 30 miles from where he was born.

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It was two days before Christopher Walsh turned 14. Shortly after, the family relocated to Massachusetts, to be near relatives.

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“That was really rough. He wasted away, died within a year of getting cancer,” Walsh said. “That happened just as I’m in the throes of adolescence, so that sucked, and I was in a new town and a new state, at a new school. Then, three months later, John Lennon was shot and killed. I had met John and Yoko Ono when I was 9 in Montauk, and that was the biggest thrill of my life because I’m so into music. So to have that happen so soon after, it was kind of numbing, I suppose.”

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With more than 50 collected works, Walsh has found a portal through which to reconnect to his father. His art is a lifeline to a man he wishes to know. An artist whom, he hopes, will be widely respected someday — “nothing more,” he said of his vision.

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“He wasn’t perfect. He was complicated, as most of us are,” he said. “But in my biased view, he put out a really impressive body of work, so it’s been really important to me to try to make sure that stuff stays in the family to a degree, but also gets out in the world as well.

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“I don’t have a specific goal in mind, but I’m hoping that by doing this, good things will happen,” he said. “And so far, it’s been all good.”

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Read the original article in the Sag Harbor Express:

January 02, 2019

The East Hampton Arts Council has chosen works by Kenneth Bonar Walsh, who lived and worked in Montauk in the 1960s and ’70s, for an exhibition at Town Hall. 

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Works not seen by the public in nearly a half-century will be prominent in the exhibition, the fourth on the South Fork to feature Walsh’s work over the last 18 months. The works included, all from the early and mid-1960s, are mostly watercolors, all created in Montauk. Along with seascapes and the iconic lighthouse, subjects include buildings, boats, and fishermen at Gosman’s Dock, where the artist painted and exhibited work at his Bonart Gallery. 

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Walsh’s soft-realist style is evocative. When a selection of his watercolor paintings were on display at the Amagansett Public Library in May 2017, one visitor wrote that she felt herself “transported back through time, standing before the subjects themselves.”

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Born in Medford, Mass., the World War II veteran attended art school on the G.I. Bill before moving to New York City, where he worked in the art department at Lever Brothers. He later established a commercial art studio, finding success with clients including RCA Records, Transogram Toys, and the Schrafft’s candy and chocolate company. 

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The artist, who loved fishing as a youth, discovered Montauk in the 1950s and eventually built a house in Hither Hills. During this time he also developed as a painter. The realism of his works depicting Manhattan and Montauk — St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, the Old Hook Mill in East Hampton, the lighthouse — evolved into stylized, impressionist portraits of self, a boy on the Central Park Carousel, and fishermen at work. A more curvaceous, softer realism developed, accentuating the muscular hands and forearms of the fishermen. 

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Along with paintings, Walsh also produced works such as an antique-style map of Montauk (to be featured at Town Hall), a children’s book (“The Littlest Fishing Boat”), and other Montauk-related merchandise. 

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Later, in the 1970s, his work evolved again, now a modernist, abstract style in which nearly all the lines were curves running the breadth of one or more figures, defining several features of a figure, as well as the boundaries between and interpenetrations of figures, often in a yin-yang symmetry of opposites. An example of this period — “Jonathan,” depicting one of the artist’s sons fishing at Montauk Harbor — is included in the exhibition. 

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Another son, Christopher Walsh, a senior writer at The Star, curated the exhibition and is the archivist of his father’s work.

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Read the original article in the East Hampton Star: 

October 30, 2017

The Bonart Corporation is proud to present its first greeting card for Christmas! In 1975 in Montauk, New York, Kenneth B. Walsh painted "A Horn Blows at Midnight," depicting his 8-year-old son, Christopher, with a present found under the tree and treasured for years to come. 

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"A Horn Blows at Midnight" is reproduced on 5x7-inch premium stock and is available at the Store page on KennethBWalshArt.com. Information about retail locations in New York and Massachusetts, where the artist lived and was born, respectively, will be announced shortly. 

May 27, 2017

Thirty-eight years after the last exhibition in the artist’s lifetime, the work of Kenneth B. Walsh has returned. Kenneth B. Walsh: Montauk in the Seventies, an exhibition of 20 of the artist’s modernist work, launches with an opening reception today at 6 p.m. at Woodbine Collection, 649 Montauk Highway, Montauk. The gallery is but a few miles from the site—Walsh’s home in Montauk’s Hither Hills—where all the work was created. 

The exhibition, which runs through June 25, opens just as another show of the artist’s 1960s watercolors concludes at the Amagansett Library.

The opening at the Woodbine Collection coincides with the launch of KennethBWalshArt.com, an archive of the artist’s work and e-store offering select high-quality reproductions of the artist’s work and a new, limited-edition fine-art book, Kenneth B. Walsh, Artist, compiled and annotated by Christopher Walsh, the fourth of his five children. Reprints of his work and the fine-art book will also be available at Woodbine Collection throughout the exhibition.

The May 25, 2017 issue of East magazine includes a feature about the restoration and return of Kenneth B. Walsh’s art, written by the artist’s son.

Contact: chris@kennethbwalshart.com

May 22, 2017

KENNETH B. WALSH: MONTAUK IN THE SEVENTIES

MAY 26 - JUNE 25, 2017

OPENING RECEPTION MAY 27, 6-8 P.M.

MONTAUK, N.Y.—In the 1950s, Kenneth Bonar Walsh Jr. (1922-1980) came to Montauk from New York City to paint seascapes, catch fish, sing of Nature’s beauty, put down roots, and, later, develop a style of painting all his own.

Born in Boston, he attended the School of Practical Art on the G.I. Bill before taking a job in the art department of Lever Brothers in New York. He had bigger dreams, though, and soon established the Bonart Studios. Clients included RCA Records, the Schrafft's candy and chocolate company, and the Ideal and Transogram toy companies, to name a few.

His thriving business afforded Walsh the occasional vacation, and he liked the bucolic environs of 1950’s Montauk so much that he built a house in Hither Hills, soon establishing the Bonart Gallery here. He captured Montauk’s beauty, mostly in watercolor but also in oil paintings, sculptures, and collages.

A bout with bipolar disorder brought everything to a halt for several years. When he emerged, he began to paint, prolifically and in a bold, expressionist style in which nearly all the lines were curves running the breadth of one or more figures, defining several features of a figure, as well as the boundaries between and interpenetrations of figures, often in a yin-yang symmetry of opposites. One sees many Picasso-esque faces and figures that are at once frontal and profile views. It’s not minimalist, but it definitely does more with less.

These works, including the iconic, mural-size Montauk, comprise Montauk in the Seventies. Every piece in the exhibition was conceived and created in Montauk between 1974 and 1977.

Years after his passing, Christopher Walsh, the fourth of the artist’s five children, began a search for his father’s work, compiling, restoring, and documenting as much as he could find. “It has turned into a years-long project,” he said, “but this has been a labor of love through which I have found many long-lost works of art and heard fond reminiscence from some of my father’s friends and colleagues. Montauk in the Seventies represents the realization of a long-held dream. My hope is that my father be recognized for his work.”

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Located between Fort Pond and the Atlantic Ocean in Montauk, New York, the Woodbine Collection features ceramics, paintings, photography and sculpture created by artists from the South Fork of Long Island, New York City, Texas, and France. Colin Brown, Woodbine Collection’s owner, has the work of more than 30 artists in his personal collection on Woodbine Drive in Springs, the inspiration for its name. The gallery is open year-round from noon to 6 p.m., closed Tuesday.

For more information about this “new local” in Montauk, contact info@woodbinecollection.com or 917-828-5776.

May 06, 2017

Exhibition runs from May 3 to May 28, 2017

May 10, 2012

From Southampton Press

August 09, 1979

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April 03, 1975

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April 11, 1963

January 21, 1962