Tender Painting

Richard Heley is a Painter, live performace painter, interactive painting with children, International performance poet and storyteller. Wild surrealist, philosophical dreamer, beautiful colourist, wacky storyteller with universal poetry. Nicholas Usherwood, Art Critic, writes of Richard : "Performance painting, poetry slam champion, interactive art with young children - such activities are not the normal profile of a committed and intensely serious-minded and hugely prolific artist but then Richard Heley's whole creative career has not followed any remotely conventional pattern. Born in Bedfordshire in 1950, he emigrated, aged 15, with his whole family, to Australia. It was a liberating decade spent there during which he quickly and, for the first time, became aware of the strength of his creative instincts and though he would have loved to go on to art school, family economics dictated a teacher training course at the Melbourne College of Education. In the strongly egalitarian society that Australia then was, this was no advantage however, such institutions being powerhouses for social and cultural change and Richard Heley found himself among some remarkably gifted and passionate teachers, most particularly in the sculpture class. Though this was not to prove his particular artistic direction, one senses, from the way he talks about this period of his life, that it was the attitude of this particular teacher, which has stayed with him ever since. But, not long after finishing there, a nostalgia for home and the fate of his village football team (of which he and an 80 year old man had been virtually the sole supporters!) drew him back to England where, painting and performing furiously, he has been based ever since. As might be expected from all of this, the painting that has emerged, particularly over the last ten years or so as he has slowly started to focus on his own rather than his more collaborative artistic activities, reflects this extreme unconventionality.