Richard Ballinger

Contemporary Landscape Painting of a House and Trees: The Retreat, 2024

2024

Richard Ballinger is a British landscape and still-life painter. “I do not draw in the landscape, I draw from it. It’s taken me inside, to the studio, imagining how it should be ... It's fun for me to make up relative scenarios about my life that will automatically create the right picture for me. Photographs, newspaper articles and books will sometimes help the process. Sometimes if the images are not right, a deconstruction will then take place. This is my favourite part of the journey — the shifting, sanding and scraping of paint, unearthing a brief history.” Ballinger's recent landscape paintings explore the theme of solace from the memories of a child. Although painted in Cornwall, where Ballinger has lived and worked since 1999, and occasionally informed by drawings, his series of brightly coloured, beautiful landscapes are symbolic meditations on formative experiences of a happy, carefree childhood in idyllic, rural Gloucestershire. In earlier works, he painted lonely figures in the landscape. Though in his more recent paintings, the figures within the paintings have been replaced by an obvious viewpoint for the imager, from the viewer. This avoids an overly determined narrative interpretation and encourages imaginative engagement. A protective wall of trees may stretch across the foreground, beyond which a thin line or path draws the eye up the picture plane towards the horizon. Perhaps like the artist as a child, we are taking refuge behind the trees, contemplating whether or not we dare to take the path into the unknown? "Ballinger’s images, constructed with often thick impasto paint, interlocking shapes or blocks of colour, a nod to the symbolic style of post-impressionist painters such as Paul Gauguin. His varied treatment of the painted surface, from the meticulous application of small brushstrokes to vigorous scraping away and scoring, evidences the painting process over time. On one level, then, happy memories of childhood freedoms — a time spent roaming the countryside seeking adventure and taking risks — might be seen as a perfect metaphor for the explorative act of painting itself." Virginia Button, Newlyn Art Gallery