Richard Hoare b. 1967

Richard Hoare is not simply a landscape painter. He is a seeker, a pilgrim of light, whose canvases are less depictions and more invocations. Born in Ipswich and raised in the storied countryside between Colchester and Sudbury, where Constable once painted and children still row to Flatford Mill, Hoare's deep-rooted connection with landscape was planted early and never left him.

His painting is an act of listening as much as seeing. From his early memories of being lost in a sunlit forest, overwhelmed by light and filled with a sense of presence, to his monastic approach to mark-making in a self-built studio wall of stillness, Hoare's art reveals a lifelong devotion to uncovering what he calls “the living song of nature.”

Now based in Shaftesbury, on the edge of Cranborne Chase, Hoare works amid the ancient traces of a land that continues to call him. He has walked the pilgrim paths of Europe, meditated in the sacred quiet of Japanese mountains, and painted with ice-traced ink carried on Chinese winds. Whether in the wilderness of Gascony or the silence of post pandemic Dorset, his practice is one of presence and poetic reverence.

Influenced by the likes of Constable, Dennis Creffield, Giorgio Morandi, and the writings of Christopher Neve, Hoare sees no divide between art and nature, music and silence, presence and process. His work draws on archetypes that transcend culture over which plays the universal language of light.

Hoare resists stylistic labels, believing, like nature, his work must shift, evolve, and remain free. "Painting,” he says, “is walking without leaving the same spot.” Through drawing, monotype, and paint, he fuses movement and stillness, turning pigment into prayer, memory into mirror, mark into metaphor.