Miles Richmond

“Painting has led me to question the assumption that we simply look out at the world.... My research suggests that we both look out and look in, and the world is literally within the mind of our complex identity. My work sets out to plot some of the geometries of a new sense of embodiment. Inevitably these representations will hardly seem recognisable or typical to eyes conditioned by the renaissance view of incarnation which photography has made ubiquitous. But they may help illuminate some who feel old ways of seeing are outworn.” Miles Richmond

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Richmond trained at Kingston School of Art in 1946 and then took classes at the Borough Polytechnic in south London under the great artist David Bomberg, who was known for his strong-minded approach and stubborn and irascible temperament. His fellow students included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Dennis Creffield and the effect of Bomberg’s teaching can clearly be seen in all of their output. Along with Creffield, Cliff Holden, Dorothy Mead and a number of others, they formed the Borough Group, an artists’ collective who had been heavily influenced by Bomberg. Richmond remained the closest to Bomberg and followed him to Ronda, Spain, in 1952, where he stayed for many of the following twenty years.

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David Boyd Haycock said of Richmond that his ‘later works – particularly his watercolours – are some of the most important and powerful by a British artist of the later twentieth century…he is one who has the potential to sit alongside Auerbach and Kossoff as a modern British artist of considerable significance.’

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The present piece appears to be Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. It possesses a striking energy and dynamism that shows similarity to the work that his friend and affiliate Dennis Creffield became most known for.

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