richard granville-smith painter

Photograph: Gavin Hansford

Richard Granville-Smith is an English artist who currently resides in Melbourne. He has lived and worked in both UK and Spain and has exhibited extensively in both countries.

In 1993 he completed his MA in European Fine Arts at Winchester School of Art in Barcelona, Spain. He has been a frequent visiting lecturer at a number of leading British art schools including: University of Brighton; Hastings College of Art; and Brighton College of Art and Technology. In 1999 he also set up and taught at his own School of Art in Southern Spain. His recent exhibitions include shows at The White Gallery in Brighton, UK and Dianne Tanzer Gallery in Melbourne, Australia.

In 2004 Richard was awarded an Arts Victoria Arts Innovation Grant to research & develop fine art works utilising industrial carbon materials. Collaborating with industrial partners Carbone Lorraine & The Carbon Company, this on-going research has involved the development of 3D carbon sculpture & large scale carbon paper works as well as continued experiments with pigment and surface in painting.

Richards studio is now located at the historic colony of Montsalvat, visit www.montsalvat.com.au for more details, where he also teaches short courses.

Richard's recent works are characterised by a surface-sensitive approach often utilising graphite and oil paint. These works reveal complex topographies formed by a painstaking process of working and re-working the surface until powerful yet quiet forms emerge. A strong sense of space and depth is created by juxtaposing surfaces. Immediately compelling, the works develop in both complexity and warmth as they continue to demand the viewers attention.

Richard believes that painting is a medium which can clarify and give concrete form to intuitive sensations that don't come to us in concrete form. It is these elusive sensations which, nonetheless, form the ground base of our perceptions of the world that are the subject of my work. Granville-Smith states "I want to make an image that is many things and yet none of them, to tune the painting to a poetic pitch where the image is a realization of the "potential" of form. The state I want to trap is form in a state of becoming form as it takes on form."