Welcome
My interests as an artist centre on the physical and cultural structures through which appeals are made to the visual imagination.
At the heart of my painting is an abstract engagement with methods and materials, informed by environmental forms, colours and textures. Simple geometric forms will usually provide the unifying motif: a circle set on a square, perhaps, or connected rectangles. Household and industrial paints, as well as varnish, are as likely to be used as traditional ‘art’ materials, and pouring, spraying and erosion can be of equal importance to the brushstroke. The simplicity of a basic geometric form creates opportunities for both exploration and interpretation, leaving room for creative risk-taking and allowing the work’s evolving features to indicate what developments can be made and how it might be concluded.
The environment, manmade and natural, is a place of communication. This can be blunt and direct, as in an advertising hoarding, a road sign or graffiti; or it can be more subtle and indirect, like the hint of melancholy in a decaying old house, the imposing qualities of large structures, or a sense of the infinite and sublime evoked by light reflected in water. My interest in these contrasting aspects of the environment can perhaps be traced to my background as a British artist who grew up in Tameside in East Manchester in the north of England; a region of former mill towns that face the buzzing city centre in one direction and the windswept moorland of the Pennines in the other.
I have since travelled extensively and continue to do so. I live and work near the English south coast in Dorset. These things in turn have impacted on my sensibilities and visual language.
Stephen Riley
Contemporary British Art