Richard
Straley | 'Landspeak'
recent landscape paintings
welcome
to my site
"The
seeing of things and the seeing into things"
Cecil
Collins 1989.
I
am a watercolour landscape painter living and working in Cranham, a village
in the Cotswolds area of SW England. My works are characterised by a
rich and vibrant use of colour, texture and copper or gold leaf.
The place where I paint is very important to me; it is mysterious and magical.
In my painting I try to bring into the light what I have previously experience
as a web of ideas and impulses, and present images of a landscape where something
out of the ordinary happens: something tribal and prehistoric. There is,
for me, a deep spiritual message in the passing of the seasons, the cycles
of growth and maturity without a beginning or an end. They form a complex
mixture of theme and counter - theme, harmony and discord, which I find echoed
in the music of John Tavener, Gregorian Chant, the Russian Orthodox Church,
and the poetry of T.S.Eliot. As a painter I admire the work of Samuel
Palmer, Mark Rothko and Cecil Collins.
After nearly 30 years in teaching, the last 26 years of which I lectured
full-time on Art and Design Foundation and Access courses in Further Education,
I accepted premature retirement in order to concentrate on painting, part-time
teaching and growing old with dignity in this wonderful part of the country.
I teach for the Reintegration Service, Bishops Cleeve Arts Centre, The Brewery
Arts Centre and The Gloucestershire Neighbourhood College.
Richard
Straley. June 2006