Approach

Approach

As a child, Richard Allen first found inspiration by browsing through the family volume of Leonardo drawings and then glancing at the carpet he saw there further faces and images within the intricate patterns.

During his studies at Art School, Richard discovered that Leonardo in his treatise on painting had advised artists to gaze at “variegations in stones and stains on walls” to assist them with their inventions. He also found something similar in Salvador Dali’s Secret Life:

The great vaulted ceiling which sheltered the four solid walls of the class was discoloured by large brown moisture stains, whose irregular contours for some constituted my whole consolation. In the course of my interminable and exhausting reveries, my eyes would untiringly follow the vague irregularities of those mouldy silhouettes and I saw rising from this chaos which was as formless as clouds progressively concrete images which by degrees became endowed with an increasingly precise, detailed and realistic personality.

This ability to invent images from random marks is the keystone of his approach to painting and how this can be used to create images from observation and personal experience, that have the power to be unique in our time of constant visual bombardment.

His style has evolved from carrying out automatic drawings that invented shapes, which were painted using a variety of further shifting brush marks.

This approach was then used to ‘Translate’ various old Masters including Bruegel, Chardin and Vermeer. This time was almost a one of apprenticeship into tradition, copying the art of the past to find his own personal style.

The techniques learned were then applied to Still Life arrangements from direct observation and has since evolved using his personal experience and a variety of consistent subjects, where the shifting shapes have turned into forms and continued to change over four decades.

His evolution has been informed by a great deal of experimentation, never being frightened to pursue the possibilities of an idea outside his main practise, indeed willingly following a new direction in order to not keep repeating himself, to maintain the evolution and to constantly find new solutions.

Returning to Leonardo, who also talks about the sound of bells in “whose peal you will find any name or word you can imagine” and looking at these paintings has that quality. Believing that it is better for the observer to become involved in the interpretation of the narrative, these images are intended for contemplation, to develop an understanding, which may go beyond what the artist intended; to evoke universal memorable mysteries.

Richard’s paintings demonstrate his very individual approach which explores new possibilities for the dialogue between representation and abstraction to produce work that adds to the traditions of both Surrealist and Pop Art for the 21st Century.