Keith Clements

Keith Clements was born in Brighton in 1931. After attending Brighton College of Art, he did his National Service in the Highland Division, based in Perth, then from 1955 to 1958 taught art in Orkney. He moved to Sussex in 1958,  becoming assistant teacher of art in Steyning then head of art at Forest School, Horsham, from 1962 to 1964.

From 1978, Clements was senior lecturer in art history at Brighton Polytechnic, sharing a show with his colleague David Chapman there in his retirement year, 1988. Clements had conducted some popular courses for the College of Arts and Humanities' foundation studies programme - including Arts and War, British and European Art and Design Between the Wars, and Artists and the Spirit of Place.

From his student years Clements had drawn and painted Sussex, but he began to feel that he had "become increasingly seduced by the notion of Olde Sussex, succumbing, sometimes sentimentally, to childhood memories, caught up in waves of nostalgia". Thus in his show at Pallant House, Chichester, in 1996, entitled "New Vistas: Sussex from the bypass", he sought to admire, indeed applaud, the bold, imaginative sweep of the new A27 through the lately resolved Southwick tunnel, an instant masterpiece that might well have had an approving nod from Brunel. Clements's last solo exhibition was at the Thebes Gallery, Lewes, in 2002. Despite a long illness, he contributed six pictures to the just- finished Salon at Sablé-sur-Sarthe, in France, where only one foreigner a year is invited to exhibit.

sourced from obituary by David Buckman