Paul Riley Paul Riley has always been a painter. Both his parents were artists and he studied at the Kingston School of Art, first exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1960 aged fifteen. He came to Dittisham by chance twenty years later while working as an architect. His studio and art school at Coombe Farm outside Dittisham have been his centre of operations ever since. Many exhibitions and one-man shows followed in England, Scandinavia, continental Europe, the US and Australia.3
After art school Riley’s palette was dark, and his inspiration, influenced by the early painting of van Gogh, was drawn from working communities, particularly mining villages in south Wales. Palette, medium and focus changed with travels to the Mediterranean. Once in Devon, Riley returned to watercolours, using a free-style brushwork as far removed from architectural drawing as possible. He met Kaldor, Drew and Gillo when he was keen to get to full-time painting again.
Riley’s dictum now is restraint, the painting of suggestion. With watercolour it requires above all looking, then patience, skill and a deep knowledge of tools and techniques, and how they interact. The changing waters of the Dart around Dittisham retain a fascination for Riley, who was brought up on the Thames. The following four paintings he plays with different ways of capturing its moods.
Misty River, Dart, watercolour, by Paul Riley, 2009.
The South Embankment, Dartmouth, print of ink and gouache original, by Andras Kaldor, 1998. The work was done for Joyce Molyneux, celebrated chef of the Carved Angel restaurant (with the blue awnings), in memory of many happy dinners. Courtesy Andras Kaldor
Compare The Budapest Opera House with what he calls ‘the stark concrete years of the sixties and seventies’ and you can see why Kaldor gave up architecture – although he stuck at it for twenty years. The tough early times of full-time painting ended when Prince Charles called the proposed extension to the National Gallery ‘a carbuncle’, and Kaldor mounted ‘Carbuncles or Masterpieces?’ in a London gallery on historic London buildings and terraces. (He denies England has much proper baroque, but he found a bit.) Commissions followed for more paintings of buildings in London and Washington, and then came European railways and opera houses, combining his love of the music of the grand opera and the architecture of opera houses.
Turning to art was one of the dodgy times in Kaldor’s life. But the dodgiest, he says, was when he left Hungary at seventeen as Russian tanks were rolling in on the revolution of 1956. Once safely in Vienna he organised travel to England, and found a place at Edinburgh University to study architecture. His architectural career in London and Yorkshire brought him to Plymouth and sailing the coast to Dartmouth.
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Courtesy Paul Riley