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- Biographical Information

Richard Winkworth - Still Life From The Edge Of Heaven

7 October - 28 October 2005

Richard Winkworth was born in Bombay in 1963 and lived there until he was eight. He recalls the vivid colours of his childhood: the clothes, the hand-painted film posters and the polished brass containers. From their small, top floor flat near the Strand, he could see the port. His father worked for the British India Steam Navigation and, with a young family, his duties were on the short 18-day route to and from Mombasa. From the roof you could just see his boat arrive and still make it down to the dock to greet the ship as it tied up.

His Father's next posting was Singapore. Talking to Richard I discovered we had both been to the same school there, missing each other by only a year. As a small child you could never forget the flavours of the city. The heat, the noise, the torrential rain and the colours offered a continous and wonderful onslaught for the senses. In Singapore every culture is your culture and every celebration shared: Hari Raya, Chinese New Year and the exotic Moon Festival provided for western children a seemingly endless succession of Christmases. In such a dense city there would be something delightful at every corner: incense breezing out from a temple gateway, dried sea-horses strung outside a herbalist's store; car-parks transformed at night into hawker food stalls, the frightening crescendo of cymbals at the approach of a funeral procession.

By then, Richard's father was chief officer on the Rajula, in 1972 the oldest sea-going ship still in active service. The family were now allowed to join him on voyages around the South China Sea and eventually an extended stay for six months as the ship worked its way around Japan. Richard was schooled by his mother aboard ship and at sea would help out with the endless renewal of polish and paint. Yet his most mesmerising story, quite literally, was the morning they entered Bangkok. The Chao Praya River was fringed with stilt villages and by day was thick with small boats. Merchant ships passing through had to anchor at sea and make their passage at dawn before the river traffic made the journey too hazardous. Woken early, Richard watched from the rails as the boat snaked its way up the river, then suddenly, as the ship slowly turned towards the city, a spectacular and precisely-timed explosion of light as the dawn sun rose to meet the gilded walls of the Buddhist Temples.

The colours, cultures and exuberance of Asia had been fused into Richard since birth. For an 11-year old boy, what childhood could be more perfect that traveling throughout the Far East on board a merchant ship? Then in 1974 his family moved to England. It was probably not the country's finest year; for Richard it was a terrible shock. Grey and dull, a three-day week, and appalling food. His days in class were spent staring out of the window and longing for the East. He had begun painting and won a place at art school. One day a tutor asked the students to bring in an object that had special significance for them. Still, Richard does not know why he chose a Chinese ginger jar from his mother's kitchen, but drawing it he realized that the objects she had collected on their journeys across Asia might provide a way for him to imagine his way back East. The ginger jar, like most of the vessels he continues to paint, had no intrinsic value; decades later they sit on shelves, chipped, but never dusty. For Richard it was the act of painting them that brought all the memories of Asia back; like a Buddhist mandala, they had become a spiritual gateway into another world.

It took another ten years before he could afford to return to Asia. Having spent so long satisfying his hunger for the East through memories triggered by ginger jars and rice bowls, he now found himself seeing the Orient in terms of its objects. From the careful placing of jars against a blood red temple wall, to the precise arrangement of trees and rocks in a Kyoto garden, he understood that in the East this consideration for the arrangement of objects was something more than merely clever design. It was at the heart of everything he loved about Asia. He came to realise that it had been no accident that the first glimpse for a traveler arriving in Bangkok should be the sun-drenched brilliance of its gilded temples. It was a perfect conjunction of elements, a still life on a massive scale, intended to awe the visitor with a glimpse of almost heavenly splendour. Working in his small London studio, it is that inspiration that continues to fire Winkworth's art.