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RICHARD STRALEY'S ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a landscape painter interested in places which show evidence of man’s passing; in particular ancient sites and ley lines, pathways, ploughing and tilling marks, abandoned settlements, lines, scrapings, circles, paths, edges and clumps.
This marked landscape conveys to me a sense of the passing of time and of age which we associate with belonging to a place. The sense that what we see is part of a continuing cycle without end or beginning.

As a painter I am trying to convey the power and the 'depth' of landscape and I feel particularly in tune with the sentiments of
Cecil Collins ( 1908 -1989), when he says of his paintings:

‘the seeing of things and the seeing into things’

I would like to feel that my paintings could convey this sense of exploration and revelation.

I find that I am more and more drawn to working within the boundary of the Stroud Five Valleys where I live, and places - Cranham, Sheepscombe, Slad, Pitchcombe, Brimpsfield and Caudle Green, places for me of great mystery and powerful emotion, where I feel a strong sense of time in the shapes of fields, the markings of plough and foot and the colour and passing of the seasons of planting, growth and death.

As with all creative people I am influenced by the work and thoughts of others. I would be totally lost without the poetry of T.S.Eliot, the paintings of Samuel Palmer, Cecil Collins, Emile Nolde, Tapies and Mark Rothko and the music of John Tavener, Peter Maxwell Davis, Strauss and Sibelius and the Chinese philosophy of The Tao.