He was educated at Bedales School, and from 1939 read History and Anthropology at Cambridge before studying Landscape Architecture at Ohio State University.

During a painting holiday in the south of France, Kidner met André Lhote who introduced him to Cubism and encouraged him to move to Paris and become a full-time painter.

He moved to St Ives for several months where he became acquainted with Trevor Bell, Roger Hilton, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, and Peter Lanyon.

On moving to London in 1957, Kidner was introduced to the New American Painting exhibition at the Tate Gallery where he saw the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

[1] He was referring to the examination of visual perception in the science of linear perspective developed by Leon Battista Alberti and other Renaissance artists in the 15th century.

[2] Kidner was also interested in the work of Seurat and the Neo Impressionists who had investigated the connection between the retina and the brain regarding colour perception, as seen in their Pointillist paintings.

[4] Later, Kidner's After Image works became hard-edged with flat uniform patterns, when he realised that optical activity producing shimmer is decreased by brushy paintwork and varied shapes.

This method produced a dramatic effect when Kidner crossed two colour bands with a third at a slight angle, resulting in a completely new pattern, with a wave-like vertical image coming into view.

At this stage he became interested in number theory as the key to "the nature of order" and "the structure of reality",[1] and was influenced by the work of Lohse.

Kidner used this structure as a basis for creating many variations of this principle and stated that "the endless number of linear intersections both offer and resist any sort of visual resolution.

This was Kidner's response to the many dystopian world events, such as global warming, war, ethnic cleansing, terrorism and intense nationalism.

Titles such as Entangled Hyacinth Bulbs (2007), Invasion of Iraq: Surprise Resistance (2007), and Particle Evolution: The End of the Tunnel at CERN (2008) indicate their subject matter.