ST IVES.- An exhibition of paintings and drawings by artist Ray Atkins is being held at Belgrave St Ives to coincide with the publication of a new 160 page monograph about the artist's life and work, written by Peter Davies.

Atkins is primarily a plein-air painter working outside, often on an epic scale, to immerse himself physically and emotionally in the landscape. Large boards are staked-down on location often for days (or even weeks) at a time letting the weather and environment help shape the work. The paintings are constructed through the process of applying oil paint vigorously at each session, the constant re-working forming a rich painterly impasto.

The artist’s chosen subjects are often neglected spaces; roadsides, quarries, and other industrial and post industrial landscapes.

‘Ray Atkins uses the outside world as a studio. The landscapes emerge from day to day involvement with an ever changing subject which is finally committed to a specific visual experience. I have admired these extraordinary paintings for many years’. Leon Kossoff.

Ray Atkins was born in Exeter, Devon in 1937. He studied at Bromley College of Art in Kent and at the Slade School of Fine Art. Atkins was inspired by Frank Auerbach and worked for a time in Auerbach’s studio. Atkins’ first teaching post was at Reading University in 1965 where he went on to record the huge upheavals that the town was undergoing through a series of paintings such as in Golden Rod and Old Turnip Plant, Prospect Street, Reading. This led to a one-person exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1974.

A teaching post at Falmouth Art School in 1974 was followed by a thirty-four year stay in Cornwall where Atkins painted the extraordinary landscape of the China Clay country around St Austell with its colossal pits and mounds of Mica.

Atkins took full advantage of the vistas from his homes at Carharrack and Lanner. Through such work he captured the desolation and natural regeneration left over by the demise of the tin mining industry and the wildness of this forgotten hinterland of Cornwall, for instance in Yellow Footpath, Praze-an-Beeble, Cornwall.

“For the painter, the last operating Cornish china clay pits were both spectacle and repository, virtually incalculable in extent, sensational in the widest, deepest, sense. They came to his attention, so to speak, many years after his early engagement with the spectacle of Millwall docks towering over turgid waters” William Feaver.

More intimate subjects of children, gardens, family life are also part of Atkins’ oeuvre. In addition to the landscape genre, Atkins is interested in how the human body moves through space and from the 1990s he has produced a series of works on the theme of dance in collaboration with dancer and choreographer Hsiao-Hwa Li.

Atkins moved to France in 2009, to Aspet in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Here he continues to live and work surrounded by forest which is one of the principal subjects of his painting, for example The Great Pear Tree, Early Spring.

The artist’s work is represented in several public collections. Atkins has exhibited regularly throughout his career including a series of one-person exhibitions at Art Space Gallery, London.