Born in London in 1951, Richard Pikesley started his artistic career at the Harrow School of Art where Ken Howard was one of his tutors from 1969-70. He then went on to study at the City of Canterbury College of Art in 1970 for three years. Within a year of leaving, he was elected to the New English Art Club. In the same year he had his first painting accepted at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and he has continued to show there ever since. In 1997 he was elected to the Royal Watercolour Society and was President of the N.E.A.C. from 2013 to 2018.
Richard’s art education valued both tradition and drawing and instilled in him a love for landscape and the effects of light and weather. As a result, his paintings are fresh, immediate and compelling. When he paints, Richard aims to capture the ‘spirit of the place’, not just to extol its beauty. What the viewer is treated to is a wonderful naturalism, an unsentimental landscape with no painterly clichés.
Richard believes that what he is doing is part of an on-going tradition that has its roots in the paintings of Constable and a belief that painting from nature, with a full painterly touch, was something not just to be prized but also nurtured. For this artist, painting is a conversation with the visual world and starts with painting in front of the subject. It is always a matter of finding equivalents, in paint, for light and space and seeing the world ‘in paint’ continues to be an obsession.
“Painting starts with an immediate response. Seeing perhaps an effect of light which really grabs my attention. The first step will usually be a painting, made fast enough to get the moment down. After years of working with oil paint and watercolour, their familiarity means I can rely on working quite instinctively at this stage. The moment passes and I usually need more information especially if I feel it could become a bigger painting. The next stage will often be to make a more considered drawing, which might take many hours. Bigger paintings may spring from this material, started in the studio and when practical taken back to the location and completed on the spot.”
Richard has had numerous solo shows in London, Dorset, Hampshire, Oxfordshire and Marlborough, and has contributed to many group exhibitions, both in this country and the USA. His paintings can be found in many private collections, including St. John’s College, Cambridge, Longleat House and the Crown Estates. Richard has won several awards and prizes, including the Woodhay drawing prize in 1998, the Alresford Gallery’s Painter’s Prize and the Discerning Eye’s Chairman’s Prize and the South West Regional Prize in 2001, and the New English Art Club Critics’ Prize, in 2022.
Richard is a successful published author. In 1991 he was commissioned by Swallow Books to write a book on landscape painting in a series edited by Ken Howard, which was published in the U.S.A. by Watson Guptil and in the U.K. by Bookmark, under the title 'The Complete Artist'. In1997 Richard wrote a technical book, 'Oils Workshop', published by Harper Collins. He has featured in two films about painting techniques in 2009 and 2011. He has more recently written two highly acclaimed books: ‘Landscape Painting - The Complete Guide’, published by Crowood Press in 2019, and ‘Watercolour Techniques for the Artist’, published by Crowood Press in 2025.
