Richard Ballinger, 'Where the Road Begins', Rope House

"I do not draw in the landscape, I draw from it. It’s taken inside me to the studio … the paintings are of a place where I want to be, and that I want to be at peace with"

Richard Ballinger, 2017

 

Over a lifetime, memories meld in our minds and form half-imagined landscapes to which we can return. It is in this way that a painting by Richard Ballinger might recall the woods in which he played as a boy, a long-ago walk through the rolling hills of Ireland and a more recently cherished view near his studio in Cornwall. Each time Ballinger draws on canvas, a collage of places appears in his mind to be distilled by the act of creation. ‘I’m deciphering it and simplifying it,’ he says. Though he may make glancing references to a newspaper clipping or personal photograph, he prefers never to plan ahead with preparatory sketches and avoids being ‘influenced too much by outside visions.’

 

The stirring impact of the artist’s style is owed to its economy of line that yields to gauzy interlocking planes of colour. Viewers of this latest body of works will note how the same, slightly abstracted language is equally effective when used by Ballinger to describe an intimate still life as a sweeping landscape. Whereas in Still Life, Blue Fern, broad vertical strokes may signify wallpaper, in The Long Road Home they become the striped contours of a rolled grass field. The stylised fronds that spread out from the stem in a vase share a formal affinity with the branches that might elsewhere articulate a distant thicket of trees.

 

Ballinger’s palette rejects straightforward naturalism in favour of more evocative colours, and the use of tonal shifts from dark to light to let scenery slowly recede. A layered effect is sometimes achieved by Ballinger through an alternating technique of construction and deconstruction, as partially dried oils are scraped back so that an enriching undertint shows through the surface. It is through their rousing use of colour that these paintings announce their debt to early predecessors like Paul Gauguin, Milton Avery, and Bob Thompson, while also reflecting a renewed interest in invented landscapes shown by contemporaries like Peter Doig and David Hockney.

 

From the introduction to the catalogue, written by Jo Lawson-Tancred, contributor to Apollo magazine and Artnet.