Irascible painter whose idiosyncratic landscapes are among the 20th century's best. Sunday Times obituary, May 2015
Please join us for the opening of our new exhibition celebrating the work of Rigby Graham. The show includes oil paintings, watercolours, woodcuts, linocuts, lithographs, drawings and stained glass and opens Saturday 9th April.
Rigby Graham (1931-2015) was a man of remarkable energy, prolific and driven, for whom art was the whole of existence. He worked long hours at great speed, pitting himself against the elements and continuing to work in the open air in front of a subject, despite rain and winds that frequently blew his spectacles off.
Through his oils and watercolours, and in printmaking that embraced lithography, etching, monotypes and linocuts, Graham left an impressive record of his wide travels within Britain, Ireland and beyond. While his sense of colour and line was influenced to some extent by the neo-romantics, who included Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash and John Minton, he also looked back to an earlier tradition of nature painting. As he said: “The landscape tells you a good deal and Turner and Cotman talk to me from the clouds.” The great John Piper wrote, I have known Rigby Graham and have admired his work for a good many years. He has an unusual and indeed enviable capacity to make romantic and dramatic images out of 'simple scenes'... He is a real graphics man, and that would nail him down and mark him out, were he not such a good landscape painter and draughtsman too.
His is thoughtful reflective work, but chock-full of emotion: anger, despair, humour, and an overriding compassion that makes his work a prime human document. Andrew Lambirth, 2016.
The exhibition in Uppingham opens on the 9th April and will run until 1st May 2016.
Join us for a rare opportunity to view such a broad range of Rigby Graham's paintings, prints, stained glass and book illustrations.