Playing a Tune"

Ivon Kitchens is a mild, silver-haired sparrow of a man with an enviable reputation: Britons (who pride themselves in such matters) consider him one of their best living landscape painters. Last week Kitchens was bidding for a reputation in an altogether different field: his new exhibition at London's Leicester Galleries consisted almost entirely of reclining nudes. Moreover, the limp, heavy figures, painted in broad strokes of summery colors, were an instant hit. Kitchens' switch to nudes, said the London Sunday Times, "has wrought a double change in his pictures, making them both richer in color and broader in construction."

Despite what a gallery official called "the traditional prejudice against buying a nude to hang up in the home," 18 of the 27 paintings on view had been sold last week for a total of -L-2,200 ($6,160).

Like his landscapes, the nudes are deceptively bland. For most of his 57 years, Kitchens has relied on sweet, misty color contrasts rather than drawing, drama, or detail; he has made sweeping strokes and smears of color stand for space, shape, weight and air. His method, he says, is like "playing" a tune--playing one color off against another. Sometimes it jars; sometimes there is no harmony and I have to start afresh. But when it fits it's wonderful."

Mrs. Kitchens conscientiously criticizes her husband's work-in-progress, calls it "our painting." Between critical chores she keeps their crowded Sussex cottage--a small son and two grandmothers, three giant tabby-cats and a dog--in reasonable order. "I love a quiet, clean space to work in," Kitchens says, "so when Mollie has cleared up a corner I go and work there; when it gets cluttered up I move to another."

His models are put up in a yellow trailer standing a few yards from the house. He paints them on couches "because they chatter less in that position." The models serve merely as springboards for Kitchens' cheerful, elegant and curiously impersonal art. On canvas their faces are almost blank and their bodies have more paint than flesh about them. But the paint is beautifully arranged.

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