Ray Richardson

Born in 1964, Ray Richardson lives and works in Woolwich (S.E. London).

Ray Richardson paints everyday life scenes based from his own experience: his native area of South-East London, travel memories or personal concerns expressed through his emblematic double, an English Bull Terrier. Mixing humour, drama and social critic, his painting tells vignettes of life, from childhood to adulthood, which often echo to soul music.

Richardson shapes this material by combining “the traditional stuff of painting with the cinematic ways of looking at things": close-up, use of shadow and elongated horizontal formats. Nicknamed the “Martin Scorsese of figurative painting", his painted snapshots immortalise urban pantomime.

His sophisticated compositions refer to both pictorial tradition (Hogarth, Hopper British littoral landscapes, abstract expressionism) and contemporary cultures (American street photography, film noir movies, James Ellroy novels, mods subculture). His narrative painting depicts a whole social panorama with its own culture.