Richard Heys

Richard Heys was born in West Yorkshire and grew up on a hill farm in the Pennines. He had an imaginative and artistic mother, who ensouled the landscape with wonderful fables and local place names. He remembers running after his father’s red tractor as he turned the grass, picnics among the bales of hay, bringing the sheep down off the moor and driving the cattle from field to field. To this day, nature and landscape are important touchstones in his work – there is a specific geography to every painting.  

Richard’s studio is based at Emerson College in the Sussex countryside. Often he hears the buzzards calling. He searches them out and looks across the valley to the Ashdown Forest and appreciates the folding landscape around him. In his current working practice he creates many overlapping layers of colour and textures of paint. The colour breaks in a certain way which may give the impression of the surface of water, the texture of bark or a sense of a map, an unfolding landscape which one traverses.

His work is in private and commercial collections both in the UK and internationally. Solo shows of his paintings have been held in the UK, Germany and Switzerland. In 2017 his work was chosen for the Creekside Open & the National Open Art Exhibition. He has had paintings selected for the ING Discerning Eye competition at the Mall Galleries in London in 2015, 2016 & 2021 and for the Royal Watercolour Society Open in 2024.He is a member of Free Painters and Sculptors, Art Can, and the Sevenoaks Visual Arts Forum.