Bradley Richards

Artist Bio

I graduated from a BA in Fine Art in 1997 from Coventry University. Since then I have had a freelance career in film and TV editing. Along side this, I created a large and ongoing body of work as photographer, being influenced mainly by the street photographers of Japan from the 1960’s. Throughout this I had a burning desire to make paintings.

During 2016, I began to make paintings. These first paintings were small and on wooden panels and paper and made in my shed at home. In August 2022, I got a studio space in London and started to work seriously on larger and more ambitious works on canvas and linen.

I currently make figurative oil paintings by manipulating appropriated images. The images, selected from personnel and found photographs and film stills, are colourised, cropped, printed out onto paper, rephotographed and colorised again. They are sometimes divided up into separate areas creating a fractured patchwork on the picture surface. Sometimes they are made as diptychs and triptychs. The final painting can emerge with off register alignments between the separately painted areas, lines and colour copied from the low-fi printout and reproduced digital artefacts. I want the paintings to hover between the imagined and the real, figuration slipping into abstraction and back again.

The aim is to disrupt and free how we see the painted image and to allow for a deeper visual experience and emotional response. The work often obliquely references world events, draws from historical archetypes and quotes art history. It is also informed by my career as a film editor, photographer and avid movie watcher. Above all I want to share my work, communicate with other artists and create opportunities to further explore what I can do in the field of art.