Hello! Welcome to ridleyfineart!

I am an artist working in the North East of England.

A strange old life; turning cloth, oil, and pigment into pieces of art. But that's what I do, been doing it ever since I can remember. I lost some decades inbetween but have been back it for ten years or so with a vengeance accepting that this is where i was meant to be.

I have paintings and prints for sale in a variety of styles. I get a lot of pleasure in expressing my thoughts and feelings in modern art, for example my expressionist paintings, or teasing a 'traditional' image into life in the genre of representationilsm (see the dock paintings, originally black and white images from around 1961 that I turned into colour). I have been asked more than once if I am running a shop showing different artists, but nah it's me moving about in different styles.

Interesting point here... what is art? it seems that there are two camps, those that see modern art as 'rubbish' and those that see representational paintings as 'just copying'. Personally, I derive the same satisfaction from both sides, itching a scratch, I am happy in both camps and anything else invetween that I find time to produce . In the end it's all canvas, oil and pigment, if it's an oil painting that is. All good fun!

At present I am embarking on something a little different for me, by combining a few of the 'styles' I use. The aim is to include detailed highlights while also allowing for freedom and expression in other areas of the painting. I love the wild (and often cold) weather, seas, brooding skies, down to the extreme of finding intensity in a neglected corner, where there is only rubble and rust. All colour, texture, form and subtle hue. I have touched on this already in the steam engine paintings (along with other paintings), or my photographs of Steetley; a now demolished area of Hartlepool. But to take it a step further, to allow for wild expression along with the detail. Stormy skies, wild seas and also detailed subjects. So maybe somewhere in all of this is the immediate future. I would love to produce work that is breathtaking, intense, almost painful. I feel it when I am down by the sea during a storm, I feel like I could scream scream at the sea and sky, so if I can express it I will know I am moving forward.

I do hope you enjoy looking at my work. It's always the best encouragement to find that somebody has had pleasure from my work and gets the same buzz that I did when I am working away at it, locked into it for weeks.

Please feel free to contact me anytime, always nice to discuss a painting, whatever.

Thanks for looking at my work, back to work for me, Rob