On leaving school, Cecil King joined the printing firm of W & S Magowan in Dundalk, where he later became a director. He painted in his spare time, and attended life classes with Margaret Irwin, but was largely a self-taught artist.He eventually gave up his career in the printing industry in 1964 to become a full-time painter. Also that year he won an award at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland´s Open Painting exhibition.

In 1967 he met Barnett Newman, who had pioneered colour-field and hard-edge painting in the United States. He was influenced by Newman but found his own distinctive style, developing an elegant, hard-edged minimalist abstraction. The surface quality of the paint and his use of colour are particularly notable. His work was included in the Arts Council´s Modern Irish Painting European touring exhibition in 1969.

He visited Berlin in 1970 and the tensions and the claustrophobic pressures of this city at the time had a lasting effect on his work. The work now in Crawford Gallery is similar to that of his Berlin series, displaying clean blocks of colour separated into sharp geometrical spaces. Red Intrusion, a silkscreen print, won the gold medal at the fourth international Graphic Biennial, Frechen, West Germany, in 1976.

A retrospective of his work was held at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin, in 1981, the same year he was elected a member of Aosdána. He was a founder member with Michael Scott of Rosc, and also a founder member of the Contemporary Irish Art Society.

— JOB