Richard Pikesley PPNEAC – Exhibition 2019
Tuesday September 17, 2019
The Fosse Gallery is delighted and honoured to be staging this Solo Exhibition for Richard Pikesley. An eminent and respected member of the arts community, Pikesley is the Past President of the New English Art Club and a member of the Royal Watercolour Society. Born in 1951, Richard was a student initially at Harrow School of Art before going to study at the City of Canterbury College of Art for three years. His art education valued tradition whilst embracing the Modern British movement of the 20th Century.
A love for landscape and the effects of light and weather, his paintings are fresh, immediate and compelling. He is described by Huon Mallalieu in Country Life as a master of skies and bird’s eye views. It was no surprise he was elected to the New English Art Club within a year of leaving Art College. This Exhibition North to South allows Richard the opportunity to exhibit paintings from recent travels encompassing varied landscapes North and South of the globe.
The further South I go as a painter, the more I am swept away by the eye- ball popping intensity of colour, the far north however, has astonished me with the beauty of a more restrained palette which allows the few notes in each ‘colour chord’ to chime like bells with real power. Painting in Iceland, the most recent of the trips documented in this exhibition, on its north coast and very close to the Arctic Circle, I experienced the long days of the artic summer. Here the sun hardly dipped below the horizon and it was light enough to paint outside at midnight.
Working on the spot en plein air, he has been painting in oils and watercolours for this collection. He takes us on a magnificent journey to Puglia, Isola di Ponza and Elba in Italy, Seville and the Andalusian countryside in Spain. Then he moves closer to home through Devon, Somerset and the Dorset coast before heading north to Harris, Lewis in the the Scottish Hebrides and finally to Iceland.
Sharon Wheaton 2019