Front Room

Exhibition runs: 24 March – 12 April 2023

This body of work reflects on Richie’s childhood memories of “back home on the farm”.

Richie finds his style somewhere between the real and the unreal, a folk art feel mixed with memory driven imaginations. A tractor working the field shares the canvas with surreal creatures of the sky and underworld, allowing the viewer to find their own meaning amongst the colourful chaos.

Richie’s paintings are created with layers of acrylic paint, charcoal, chalk pastels, oil pastels and posca pen. Often each layer of paint conveys a different layer of memory associated with the scene, communicating the repetitive nature of farming seen differently through the seasons but also as one grows older and nostalgia takes hold.

This exhibition follows a massive loss of works in a studio fire, so there is a sense of grief and letting go embedded in these new works.