White board binding with blue title and painting on front board.

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Celebrating the life and work of the Yorkshire artist Arthur Kitching. ‘Sea and Sand’ is a compilation of black and white drawings with texts done in the 1950’s inspired by memories of beach scenes.

Arthur Kitching  (1912-1981), figurative and abstract painter and writer, was born in Sheffield. At 16, after matriculation from school, he was employed in a steelworks as a clerk. He studied engineering in evening class, but was continually drawn to art and writing. During 1934, he studied art for five evenings a week at Sheffield College of Art where his talent was recognised. In 1935 Arthur was offered a place at the Royal College of Art in London if the necessary fee of £200 could be raised. This was a considerable sum of money then, which Arthur was unable to afford, so he studied art and painted in his own time, taking any available mundane job to support his interest. In 1950, married by this time to Joyce, the couple moved to the Chelmsford area, where Arthur found work with Essex County Council as a draftsman and worked on the drawings of the first Essex County Plan. This started a 26 year career for him in local government.

In 1958 he returned to Yorkshire to work for Leeds Planning Department and was employed as an assistant in the local authority Surveyors Office at Ilkley, where he lived at Glan-y-Don, a large rambling house beside the River Wharfe and where he established his studio. He became first an administrator, then in 1964 the first curator, of the recently opened Manor House Museum and Art Gallery, Ilkley. He was later appointed Exhibitions Organiser for the Bradford Art Galleries. He had his own solo exhibition at the Manor House in 1965; by then he was in his early 50s

In 1988, to connect with the book ‘Sea and Sand’, an exhibition of his paintings of Scarborough toured Bradford, Halifax, Scarborough and Whitby.