I joined the talented team at Arts University Plymouth in 2020. For my first 13 months in Devon, I lived through the lockdowns beside the sea in Wembury where I completed my 10-year conversation with Milton’s Paradise Lost,alongside a commission from the Milton Society of America for Milton’s early poem Lycidas.
In December 2021, I moved into my new studio in the centre of Plymouth and began my Manifesto of Painting. These paintings explore the colour green and are a declaration of my lifetime of practice, teaching and exhibiting. They are a wholehearted celebration of the wonder of painting as an ancient, noble, and contemporary human language outside of words. Painting is an embodied, analogue means of expression. Right now, in the 21st century, it is low-tech and therefore subversive as a slow, hands-on visual language with many iterations and genres.
Richard studied at Chelsea School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, completing his MA at the Royal College of Art in 1986. He is Course Leader of BA Painting, Drawing & Printmaking and Senior Lecturer on the matching MA at Arts University Plymouth. He now lives and works in Plymouth.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2023: Vol. 5, Benjamin Rhodes Arts, London
2021: Hope in an Age of Anxiety, First Prize Winner, London Sunny Art Prize
2015: Landscape is a Conversation, LARQ Gallery, Queenstown, Tasmania
2014: Still Life with Blackbirds, Corinium Museum, Cirencester
Thoughts in Search of a Thinker, LARQ Gallery, Queenstown, Tasmania
New Work, Celia Lendis Contemporary, Moreton-in-Marsh
1987-1994: Four solo exhibitions with Benjamin Rhodes