Russell Dorey

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About me

RUSSELL DOREY
Website: www.russelldorey.co.uk
Address: 31 St. Thomas' Road, Hastings, East Sussex, TN34 3LG.
Tel. (10424)201843

I've put a dozen paintings up in THE DRAGON BAR on George street, they'll be there for until the 2nd December
and I have just had an exhibition in London at Abbott and Holder
(30 Museum Street, London, WC1A 1LH. tel. 020 76373981)
The exhibition is on view on their website: www.abbottandholder.co.uk

I've made a living from for the two decades since I left the Royal Academy School by painting, working in London, the south west of France and lately in Hastings.
Despite an innate disregard for anything which begins to look too much like a career I have been commissioned by the National Trust, I have sold paintings through Agnews on Old Bond St in London and many other galleries
and exhibit regularly at:

The Curwen Galleries
(34 Windmill St, Fitzrovia, London, W1T 2JR)
You can still see my exhibition from July '08: www.curwengallery.com

The Spa Galleries
(24 the Pantiles, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN25TN. tel.01892 542647)

I was born in 1961 and brought up on the Suffolk border (but it was undeniably Essex). I was largely passive throughout the term of my education at Felsted school, until my epiphany on the A604, when I decided on an impulse to leave school in order to study art. I did a two year Foundation Course, then a degree at Maidstone School of Art (1979-82) and a three year Post graduate Diploma at the Royal Academy School (1983-86).
I’m primarily a draftsman. Drawing seems to be a job of work, like building a wall, and drawing is my scaffolding. Painting is different, it's more like juggling. Although I have painted some successful interiors and I often incorporate myself as an object in compositions, I paint predominantly Still Life, but every pot or jug I paint is a portrait and for me a Still Life is a little controllable landscape with bottles for trees and boxes for buildings and most importantly an unmoving light source from a window.
I assemble loosely balanced still lives, recombining familiar objects as characters in shallow, deliberately limited space. Working analytically I try to bind the objects together into an architecture of form and colour. I’ll paint the same passage day after day, repaint the same transition of light into shadow, trying to understand how the shapes fit together to describe the space, watching for the alchemy as colour and tone become light.
(Those paintings marked with an asterisk * are unsold )