Richard Elliott

ELECTED ARWS 2023

Richard Elliott studied painting at Manchester University and went onto postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy Schools. He has exhibited internationally, is represented in public and private collections, as well as having won awards for his work.

Although having exhibited many oil paintings and photographs in the past, his focus has recently shifted to predominantly watercolour in recent years. His architecturally focused watercolours are often occupied with Twentieth Century buildings, from the ‘International Style’ to Brutalism, and more recently, contemporary communal architecture, depicting places of transit such as airports, shopping malls and train stations, as well as public pools and modern housing blocks. These spaces are often privately owned and scrupulously maintained, polished and cleaned, presenting us with an untouched, homogenised world, very much in opposition to our everyday, domestic environment. The work is distilled through endless amounts of photography, edited and simplified and then painted large scale with watercolour on paper stretched and mounted on wooden panels.

Elliott’s paintings often offer unpopulated re-readings of these modern-day cathedrals to consumerism and buildings and structures sometimes at the beginnings of being subsumed by nature. These images have an echo that references the architects’ idealised illustrations, but using the qualities of watercolour to render what can be clinical, hard-edged modern spaces into a romanticised vision of the built world we inhabit.