"Sophia" Painting

Creator of colour-driven abstract paintings with presence. Richard Heys B.A (Hons) Fine Art was born in West Yorkshire, England and grew up on a hill farm in the Pennines. He had an imaginative and artistic mother, who ensouled the landscape with wonderful fables and local place names. He remembers running after his father’s red tractor as he turned the grass, picnics among the bales of hay, bringing the sheep down off the moor and driving the cattle from field to field. To this day, nature and landscape are important touchstones in his work – there is a specific geography to every painting.

Richard’s studio is based in the Sussex countryside, thirty miles south of London. Often he hears the buzzards calling. He searches them out and looks across the valley to the Ashdown Forest and appreciates the folding landscape around him. In his current working practice he creates many overlapping layers of colour and textures of paint, through the use of squeegees, brushes and other print making tools. The colour breaks in certain ways which may give the impression of the surface of water, the texture of bark or a sense of a map, an unfolding landscape through which one traverses.

Richard is inspired by abstract painters such as Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Per Kirkeby and Brice Marden. Colour is his touch stone, and he describes his work as ‘colour driven’.

“In flow, things come into presence in my work. I don’t paint to illustrate or realise ideas, the work is its own revealing and holds a mystery for me. As Seamus Heaney writes, we go to art to be ‘forwarded within ourselves’. This casting myself forward enables me to bring a spaciousness and a sense of the numinous into my work.”

Richard's work is held in private and commercial collections both in the UK and internationally. Solo shows of his paintings have been held in the UK, Germany and Switzerland. He has shown his work at The Other Art Fair in London and in Bristol on numerous occasions. His paintings were selected for the prestigious ING Discerning Eye competition at the Mall Galleries in London in 2015, 2016 & 2021 and for the Royal Watercolour Society Open in 2024. Most recently he was awarded the Jacksons Art Prize for his painting selected for the 2025-26 Winter Group Show at Linden Hall Studio in Deal on the Kent coast.