Rachel Richards is a UK abstract painter with Iraqi heritage who grew up between Bristol and Saudi Arabia. Her paintings draw on memories of the Middle East, from busy, ornate cities to old towns and desert.
Background
Richards studied Art and Design at the University of East Anglia in the 1990s, specialising in printmaking. She then worked as a freelance textile designer before turning to painting.
How she works
She calls her approach intuitive. She starts with one choice. “I make a decision, light or dark,” she has said. From there she responds to what happens on the canvas, and a painting can take hours or months. Some she keeps. Others she scraps.
Her surfaces are heavily layered. She mixes acrylic with metallic paint and gold leaf, and builds in fabric, paper and sand. The gold is there for contrast against rough textures, which echo the mix of grandeur and decay she remembers from the places she grew up.
What to look for
Her canvases are best seen up close, where the layers of fabric and sand show. Much of the meaning is in the texture rather than in any picture: the shine of gold catching light against a gritty surface stands in for a memory surfacing.