Bryan Kneale

This morning in Mayfair we poke our head into the Royal Academy's courtyard to find the assembly of .. a strange silver sculpture that looks like an oil-tanker's propeller. Cranes do their heavy lifting and ten our so engineers beaver away to put the pieces in place. I want to learn more, including the artist, and later we stop by to find the artist himself - Bryan Kneale, pictured. Kneale studied at the Royal Academy in the 1940s and went on to win the Rome Prize and spent much of his life and career in Italy though he is from the Isle of Man. During the '50s he learned welding and in 1960 took to sculpture in preference to painting. Today he is gentleman if somewhat frail, and I note his spectacles need a cleaning. His mind is sharp and we discuss a bit of his life, and he tells me that this particular sculpture flowed from his fascination of how an orientation effects the space it occupies. He named it "Triton III" after the work completed, and notes to Madeleine that "it is a three-part system and reminds me of the Greek god's sword" (Triton the messenger of the deep, and son of Poseidon; both carried three-pointed tridents). An interesting collaboration takes place between Kneale and the builders, which in England is the Cass Sculpture Foundation, a charity dedicated to commissioning twenty-first century British sculpture (I spend some time talking to the head engineer and he takes his job seriously while admitting it is a bit, ahem, esoteric). I thank Bryan and promise him this photo.