Ray Atkins is a British figurative artist, member of the St Ives School & the London Group and educator. He was born in 1937 in Exeter, Devon, and studied art at Bromley College of Art and at the Slade School of Fine Art. He is known particularly for his large paintings, painted in situ over a period of weeks or months.

Atkins taught at Bournemouth College of Art from 1965 to 1970, at Reading University’s department of fine art under Claude Rogers and in 1971 at Epsom School of Art. He went on to paint in Cornwall, teaching at Falmouth School of Art. In 2009, he moved to France, where he continues to paint.

Life and career

After graduating from the Slade in 1964, Atkins initially worked in London. He was influenced by the painting of Frank Auerbach, and while he was at the Slade School of Fine Art for postgraduate studies he worked in Auerbach's studio. Before leaving London he completed a series of large paintings of Millwall Dock.

Atkins taught at Bournemouth College of Art from 1965 to 1970. He moved to Reading in 1970 to teach at Reading University's department of fine art, where he worked alongside John Wonnacott. Atkins' style of teaching was to paint alongside the students. Frank Auerbach, who was an occasional visiting tutor at Reading, commented on this in conversation with Atkins: 'I was very impressed by that fact that unlike most teachers [...] you seemed to be spending all your time in the room with the students. Setting an example, the best thing you could do.'

In 1974 he moved to Cornwall, where he taught at Falmouth School of Art. In his own art, he produced a series of paintings of the industrial heritage of Cornwall: old mines, quarries and the open cast china clay pits around St Austell and on Bodmin Moor. He became a member of the London Group in 1978.

In 2009 Atkins relocated, with his partner dancer and choreographer Hsiao Hwa Li, to a remote farmstead near Aspet, Haute-Garonne in the foothills of the French Pyrenees.

Style and influences

Atkins typically creates a painting over a period of weeks or months. "In a sense, my paintings are the opposite of Impressionism. My paintings are often constructed over a fairly long timescale of a few days to a few months. It is by the accumulation of several moments, from my observations over a long period and the work of the material that I recreate a new situation, the sensation of the moment”.

While at Reading, Atkins started to work on gigantic paintings out of doors, painting close to the River Thames. "I was reading about Le Corbusier, about how he wanted all his buildings to have a human measurement, and I thought painting should have this connection with the human body as well and so I decided to do a six foot square picture. He found a suitable site at Milwall Dock and obtained permission from the Port of London Authority to paint there. Since that time, Atkins paintings have usually been created on-site, and are often on a monumental scale. As Leon Kossoff wrote in 2003: "Ray Atkins uses the outside world as a studio. The landscapes emerge from day to day involvement with an ever changing subject which is finally committed to a specific visual experience. I have admired these extraordinary paintings for many years."

After moving to Cornwall, he developed his method of painting on large scale from direct observation of the landscape, leaving the works were left in situ until finished. He sets up his boards, often up to three metres wide and weighing fifty kilograms, in front of the landscape, fixing the work to the ground securely and leaving them in place over a period of weeks as works in progress.

Collections Atkins' works can be found in many public and private collections, including the British Council,Ray Atkins' Green Gorse, 1991, from the British Council collection the Arts Council of England,Ray Atkins' Carharrack II, 1983, from the Arts Council collection the British Museum,Ray Atkins on the British Museum website the Newlyn Art Gallery and Reading University's collection.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

1970: Piers Morris Gallery, London 1974: Whitechapel Art Gallery 1977: Newlyn Art Gallery 1983: Royal Institution of Cornwall, Truro 1985: Galerie Leisten und Thiesen, Munster, Germany 1988: Eurogallery, London 1989: New Paintings Art Space Gallery, London 1991: New Paintings Art Space Gallery, London 1993: New Paintings Art Space Gallery, London 1995: New Paintings Art Space Gallery, London 1996: Ray Atkins retrospective, Art Space Gallery, London 1996: Ray Atkins retrospective, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol 1997: Kilkenny Arts Week, Kilkenny Castle Ireland, (invited artist) 1998: New Paintings, Art Space Gallery, London 1999: Ray Atkins and the Figure, Art Space Gallery, London 2001: Broken Ground, Wheal Jane mine, Truro (in collaboration with poet Peter Redgrove and composer Paul Hancock) 2001: Rhythm of the Seasons, Art Space Gallery, London 2003: Paintings 2003, Art Space Gallery, London 2005: Paintings 2005, Art Space Gallery, London 2007: Paintings and Drawings 2007, Art Space Gallery, London 2009: Aspet s'Expose (invité d'honneur), Aspet, Haute- PaintingsGaronne, France 2011: Ray Atkins: The Long View: from Cornwall to the Pyrenees, Art Space Gallery, London and touring: 2012: Ray Atkins: The Long View: from Cornwall to the Pyrenees, Dean Clough Art Gallery, Halifax, West Yorkshire 2014: Jean Marmignon Theatre Gallery, St Gaudens, France 2015: At the Forest's Edge Art Space Gallery, London 2016: The Reading Years Reading Museum, Reading, UK

Selected group exhibitions

1961 onwards: London Group exhibitions. 1964: Young Contemporaries 1968: From Life, Camden Arts Centre 1974: British Painting '74, Hayward Gallery, London 1978: Newlyn Society at Pont Aven, Brittany, France 1982: Summer Show I, Serpentine Gallery, London 1983: Cleveland International Drawing Biennale 1984: Dortmund Art Fair, Germany 1985: Royal Society of British Artists(invited artist), Mall Galleries, London 1986: Twentieth Century British Artists and the Sea, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle 1989: Salute to Turner, Agnew's, London 1995: Royal Academy summer exhibition 2001: The London Group at the Walk 2005: Tree-Mendous, Falmouth Art Gallery 2011: Flashback, Art Space Gallery, London

Bibliography

Buckman David, (2006), Artists in Britain since 1945, Vol 2, Art Dictionaries Ltd, Bristol

References

External links

Painting with Ray Atkins, film by Henry Rupert Willmott on Youtube The Guardian on Ray Atkins' 2012 exhibition at Dean Clough

Art critic William Feaver on Ray Atkins' work Paintings on the move, Reading Museum