Page 10 - Richard Kenton Webb: Vol.5

shaping the direction of our conversation. Thirty years on we continue
to talk, weaving art and ideas together in an ongoing conversation that
draws us ever closer together as compan ions on a journey to interrogate
the language of art.

Today, I stand in his latest studio, in Plymouth, looking at the densely
worked charcoal drawings that emerged during his recent residency
at the Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut. Alongside them are
a series of Green paintings that transform the South Devon landscape,
which has recently become his home into a metaphysical wonderland.
These sublime portraits fuse the body and landscape, the self and other
into a visionary psalmody that reveals the divine within the everyday.

RD Another studio Richard, another triptych, but even so, we are still talk ing
about the same things: colour, landscapes, language, narratives, faith,
and the human figure. Over the years there have been times when the
figure has been absent, times when the landscape has disappeared,
times when the narrative in your head has been difficult for me to dis cov -
er in the painting, but they still draw me into a place of mysterious fam -
iliar ity. You show me the world I know and recognise then pull back
a veil and expose another reality, a space of beguiling otherness in
which strange machines stand on hillsides and a figure floats in the sky.