Kenneth Rowell (1920-1999), painter, made his career in both the visual and the performing arts. As a teenager he worked as a window dresser, spending his spare cash on theatre tickets and his spare time at the NGV. He travelled to London in 1950, with Sir Laurence Olivier as a referee. Here he worked on a number of theatre shows, but he also made paintings incorporating collage, reflecting the interest in primitivism shared by fellow expatriates Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd. Over the following years he worked in Australia and England on more than 140 ballet, opera and theatre productions, and continued to create expressionist paintings and mixed media works that won critical acclaim in Australia and England. The two strands of his career combined in his austere yet evocative sets for Peter Sculthorpe's Rites of Passage at the end of the 1970s.
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