Artist Q&A: Philip Richardson

Philip Richardson

HCA: How did you get into art?

Philip: At school I was the cartoonist, & I always drew & painted  but for a career I wanted to be an architect. For A Level I chose Economics for a subject, I could only stand three weeks of that & switched to Art. I was hopeless until my teacher showed me a painting by Cezanne, the scales fell off my eyes, I could see that the painting went far more than being a picture, & since then the whole activity of painting has been an intellectual challenge that has kept me occupied & inspired.

HCA: How do you start each piece? Do you generally have an idea about the image you’re going to create before you begin?

Philip: I think I always now start a painting with an idea of colour, the image comes later. With still life that is easy but for landscapes I either go in search of the colour combination (which has a lot to do with the season) or else I am struck by colour of a location whilst out walking. Many paintings follow on from ideas gained working on particular subjects.

Sometimes I might get an idea for a painting from a dynamic. i,e I did a still life not long ago based on a tick - short downward dynamic followed by a long upward one...that sort of thing. I think flower arrangers do this.

I do hold an image in my mind but rarely does a painting work out exactly the same.

HCA: What materials do you use and why?

Philip: Oil paint for canvases, I only started watercolours about fifteen years ago after seeing Turner’s Blue Rigi in Tate Britain but my watercolours are for me, like a diary. I draw with the thickest, blackest leads possible.

HCA: Where do you get your inspiration from?
Nature, trees etc. And, as I say above, colours.

HCA: What’s your studio like?

Philip: Organised, smaller than I’d like though.

6.Are there any other artists (past or present) that inspire you?

Philip: Yes loads! Where to begin...obviously Cezanne was & still is a big inspiration (see question 1), through Cezanne I began to understand & appreciate Poussin, in fact I consider him the Number One in my list, he is the Bach of painting. 

Other artists I really rate are Titian, Duccio (after all the years I lived in Siena), Constable, Turner (mostly watercolours though), Stubbs & Richard Wilson always surprise me how darned good they were.

As a student I was inspired &excited by the drawings & sketches of Giacometti, paintings by Soutine,  Bomberg, Auerbach & Uglow.

Recently I have really come to rate Gauguin, the paintings he & Bernard did in the 1880s where so radical.

HCA: What is it you are trying to achieve in your pieces?

Philip: It’s old fashioned but I really would like to arrive at some sort of beauty. Colours and pictorial composition seems a way of arriving at an aesthetic; subject matter for me is less important. So one would imagine that abstraction would be my means, but I have always thought that a link to representation is an addition that allows a viewer access and communality with the work. I think I am always painting abstract paintings, decisions whilst working are always about composition, colour & mark relationships, the image takes care of itself I find. 

I am also interested in perception, I am convinced from my own  experience and what I have picked up by reading about how the brain analyses visual input, that as we go about everyday life we ignore a heck of a lot that the optic nerve conveys to the brain. Therefore vision is not really based on detail until we have the motive to study something new, interesting or a threat. This is something I try to explore in my paintings, but I don’t really know what I’m doing - it’s an interesting thing to pursue though.

I’d like to leave the viewer with some work to do, too much representational content in a way alienates the viewer from the painting (if that makes sense).

HCA: How do you know when a piece is finished and when it’s the right time to stop?

Philip: Always a difficult question. Sometimes a painting just tells me to stop, I dislike that if it happens too quickly - makes me think I have seriously overlooked things.

Sometimes I will stop a painting when it seems to have arrived at a state that works, it might be nowhere near where I want to take it. In these situations I will begin another painting of the same idea with the intention of going further. This is liberating because on canvas 2 I have nothing to lose & can push ideas far further.

If & when I find I am adding marks & removing them with white spirit I know the painting must be near a finish, by then the whole structure is working together and if additions destroy the equilibrium then I have to stop.

I confess though that I have finished paintings when I get bored with them. These are often the ones I destroy years later realising they were left in a very weak state.

HCA: Are there any other art forms that you would like to try such as sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, painting etc? 

Philip: Too busy with paintings! And I don’t understand sculpture. I would like to do some drypoint prints but where is the time?

HCA: What are you working on currently?

Philip:Currently four paintings, two landscapes & two still lifes. I work slowly so like to have at least four on the go at a time.