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1950	In Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, ten year old Ken Danby is awarded first prize at his school's hobby show for a portrait drawing of his father. He is the 'school artist' who is always asked to create murals for special events. He has already determined that his future will be in the world of art.   Completing grade 8 at the young age of 12, Ken is one of four students to be featured in the local newspaper - where he publicly states that his ambition is to be an artist.
1952
1956	At the age of 16, Ken wins a high school poster contest. His reward is a large book on the history of art - the first of many in his collection.   As a teenager, Ken is active in many sports and student activities. He plays organized hockey and is a high achiever in the Sault's Air Cadet Squadron - while always pursuing his enjoyment of art. He also continues to develop his love of nature on hiking and canoe trips in the rugged landscape of Northern Ontario.
1957
1958	Ken travels to Toronto to enroll as a first year student at the Ontario College of Art. He devotes himself to drawing and painting - day and night - as he enjoys his new found freedom to concentrate solely on advancing his skills... and grow a beard. During a visit to Ottawa, following his first year at O.C.A., Ken recruits a mountie to pose for him at the front entrance of the Parliament Building. A number of Ken's works are featured on television in Sault Ste. Marie, and the 19 year old is asked to discuss his views on art.
1959
1960	After successfully completing his second year of art college, but now disenchanted with much of the program, Ken decides to leave and strike out on his own He finds employment in a variety of art positions to support himself - while he continues (sans beard) to explore various directions in his painting.   For the next three years, Ken becomes a fixture of the Toronto folk music scene in the coffee houses of Gerrard Street and later, the Yorkville area. He serves as Art Director for the Mariposa Folk Festival, and is a frequent participant of the artists', writers' and musicians' get-togethers at the original Pilot Tavern on Yonge Street (with another beard).
1961	Having been reluctantly persuaded by a few of his art college instructors that "one would have to be an abstractionist in order to be taken seriously as an artist," Ken has explored variations in abstraction for the past year and a half. The efforts result in his first one man exhibition, at the Pollock Gallery in Toronto. The exhibition is quite successful.
1962	At Toronto's Four Season's Outdoor Art Exhibition, Ken exhibits a few abstract works, one of which is selected for a purchase award by the adjudicator, Alan Jarvis, then director of the National Gallery. Regardless of this accolade, he becomes increasingly frustrated with limiting himself to abstraction and soon returns to drawing and painting in a representational mode.
	Later in the year, he attends the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, to see an exhibition by the American painter Andrew Wyeth. The exhibition profoundly confirms for him that his earlier decision to return to working from nature, is the right one. For the following few years, Wyeth remains a strong influence on his work.
1963	In the spring of 1963, Ken gives up his position as a designer for the Toronto Telegram (newspaper) to devote himself to painting full time. By early fall, after continual struggling to earn a living, he feels that he needs confirmation of his work, and decides to seek representation from a dealer. Two dealers offer measured encouragement. A third offers to represent his work as well as providing strong encouragement. This is Walter Moos, of Gallery Moos Ltd. on Yorkville Avenue, who becomes Ken's primary agent for the next twenty-seven years.
1964	Ken participates in a three-man exhibit at Gallery Moos. In a newspaper review, Paul Duval, the noted critic proclaims him to be "...one of the country's finest pencil drawing and watercolour artists." Ken is awarded the prestigious Jessie Dow Prize at the Spring Exhibition of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, for his egg tempera painting, Fur and Bricks. Winter Window, a pencil drawing, is selected for inclusion in the National Gallery of Canada's Exhibition of Drawing and Prints - by the guest adjudicator, William S. Lieberman, Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The National Gallery purchases the drawing for its permanent collection.
	In the fall, Ken returns from Northern Ontario where he has spent an intense summer of work, and in November, holds his first one-man show at Gallery Moos. It virtually sells out on opening night! The egg tempera painting featured on the exhibition announcement is simply titled, Window.

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