After gaining a first in Fine Art at Liverpool, Philip Richardson began his artistic career in lecturing on life drawing before moving to Italy in 1979. This move, he recalls, was of great significance as it brought awareness of colour and light “as they had not existed previously”. and introduced him to the early Tuscan artists. He subsequently moved to Spain and more recently the South of France where he prefers to work in total isolation and finds the dramatic light suits his bold abstracted approach.

His artistic statement offers some interesting insight into his art –

Stepping back from representation an artist encounters all manner of new problems that the dominant painted image usually disguises or minimises. One becomes more aware of managing relationships between marks, dynamics, and colours. Painting is no longer picture-making, it is now choreography. It immediately becomes a more creative activity.

Every paint-mark I put down is concerned with its effect on, and effect from, the other marks already within the canvas rectangle; I make little attempt at making these marks the building-blocks of a recognisable image, yet to my constant surprise the image appears by itself over time. Observation is the source material for the marks I put down, but I choose tone, colour, and dynamic in my observation rather than detail. This I am sure is closer to how we perceive actuality.

The magical yin-yang tension between the abstract construction of coloured marks and the image for me is one of the most important elements in painting, yet the hardest to convincingly achieve without one eclipsing the other.”