COASTEROLLER

The graphic works of Ray Richardson
Preview Drinks Thursday 19th April 6-8.30pm
Exhibition 20th April to 19th May 2018

'The best representational painters have always generated their own worlds. They have populated topographies and poetic logic, making places that parallel lived-reality, but remain enigmatically separate from it. So it is with the extraordinary painted world of Ray Richardson'
Paul Greenhalgh Director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at University of East Anglia.

Ray Richardson is South East London born and bred and the defiantly un-gentrified manors of Woolwich and Charlton remain his stomping grounds, and the people (and dogs) in it,  his inspiration. A Goldsmith's graduate when Brit Art was just kicking off 1980s he  remained true to his roots, 'it was figurative painting. I just used to paint my friends; it was to do with my life.' This show of predominantly graphic works, some using a cinematic panoramic format, explains why he has been asked why he doesn't make films - and why he has been described as the Martin Scorsese of the art world. Marcus Harvey of Turps Banana wrote recently about the artist, 'Ray Richardson you will know as the artist who paints English Bull Terriers, South London Geezers, fat motors strobing through the Rotherhithe tunnel, and  gauzy coastal Essex Landscapes. And sideburns. "The Sweeney" on canvas. For decades now. This doesn't seem to fit squarely with so much art out there. Can this be tolerated?...' read on here