Ray Richardson was born in 1964 in London, England. He studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art between 1983-1984 and Goldsmiths Collage between 1984-1987.
His work presents snapshots of contemporary life with a deliberate cinematic quality rendered by his treatment of subject matter and the use of compositional techniques employed in filmmaking. Indeed, Iain Gale of The Independent dubbed him as the “David Lynch of canvas and paint”. This formal closeness with cinema is combined with influences from pictorial tradition (Goya, Hogarth, Hopper) and contemporary culture (soul music, photography). Charged with tension and humour, his work reflects the life he observes around him: “From as far back as I can remember really, I used to just draw people that I saw, that lived on my estate or down my street”.
Richardson was first invited to work at Glasgow Print Studio in 1991 and has since made over 30 editions and had two solo exhibitions in the gallery.
In 1993, the Telegraph Magazine commissioned paintings and drawings by Richardson of the world heavyweight champion boxer Lennox Lewis, which now reside with the National Portrait Gallery. In 2015, two of his works were selected for inclusion in “Reality: Modern and Contemporary British Painting”, an exhibition organised by the Sainsbury Centre about the most influential painters from the last sixty years, including Francis Bacon, Ken Currie, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Paula Rego, George Shaw, Walter Sickert and Alison Watt.
