Richard Heys

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 ...

BA (Hons) Fine Art (Sunderland University) 1986
Diploma in Sculpture Emerson College 2001
PGCE (DTLLS) Central Sussex College 2012

My work is currently on show in the United Kingdom at Adam's Gallery in Reigate, at Clifton Fine Art in Bristol, and at Wilverley Gallery in Lymington.