About the Artist
Richard Birmingham, a founding member of Roar Studios, has worked and exhibited in Melbourne for over 50 years. His awareness of the changing face of contemporary art over that time has seen him neither tempted nor seduced by the fashionable or the kitsch in art.
His work is expressionist in approach and demonstrates an ongoing commitment to drawing and painting as a primary force in contemporary arts practice.
Richard has set up a teaching and mentor program through the Melbourne Studio School where students attend workshops, have contact with professional artists and gain support in their artistic endeavours within a community atmosphere. Founded in 1998, the school grew out of a need to speak up for drawing and painting in a Post Modern era where conceptual arts practice and critical theory dominated teaching in most art colleges across Melbourne. Life drawing in particular and the learning of manual skills became a casualty during this time along with concepts like self-expression and originality. There was a need for an Atelier based school in Melbourne which continued to value painting and drawing and remained committed to teaching these fundamental skills. Richard’s students work with a variety of approaches and media in weekly classes and in school holiday workshops. Classes run during the school term and move between direct observation on the one hand and memory and imagination on the other. Students will paint and draw throughout the term exploring such varied themes as figure, still life, lyrical abstraction, masterwork transcription and "En Plein air" landscape during the warmer months. The classes pursue a gradual assimilation of skills to hold both the observed and the imagined in balance. Work can be abstract, figurative or a combination of both. All work undertaken at the school is built on an understanding of art history and its influence on painting today.
Artists Background Statement
By way of a brief history, I started painting seriously in the early 1970`s. In 1976, I began my studies at the Victorian College of the Arts and graduated 1978.
After art school I established a studio in Green St Prahran and worked there with Tony Mighell, David Larwill, Peter Ferguson, Wayne Eager and Mark Howson. This studio was to become a springboard leading to the foundation of Roar Studios in July of 1982 when we had the first show in the Fitzroy premises.
The early days at Roar were formative and challenging and now recognized by art historians and writers as an important period in the development of Australian painting. Roar Studios and Brunswick Street in general provided a moving kaleidoscope of characters and fashion that triggered the imagination and supported the idea of living a creative life. I miss that time but have continued to exhibit and teach in the years since. In 1998 I established the Melbourne Studio School of Painting and Drawing. Teaching students has helped keep painting alive for me and the ideas flowing.
Australian painting has had a long-standing preoccupation with the landscape and figures in that landscape. I share that preoccupation and in a general sense my work is about an imagined urban landscape and how people occupy that space both in a physical and metaphorical way.
My work is expressionist in approach and reflects an engagement with the language of painting, a language that includes expressive colour and mark making as an important part of the vocabulary.
The images you see in my work are searched for and found and more likely to be poetic than descriptive. Shifting presences co-opted from earlier paint layers are embodied in the substance of paint. Human touch and trace together with colour and surface are all part of the “Image” and intrinsic to the paintings meaning.
It’s only through the unfolding process of making a drawing or painting that you become aware of the many possibilities open to you as you develop the image. These possibilities cannot be anticipated beforehand and seem borne out of the material itself. So paint will present one set of possibilities while charcoal and pastel another. Good work can only come from understanding these differences.
I want to find something new every time I paint.
RB
Richard’s influence on early Roar
“An early example of the treatment of the figure by the Roar artists appears in a charcoal design by Richard Birmingham. His influence as a trigger in interpretations of the figure, as evident in Figures in a Landscape, 1981/1982, appears to have been instrumental in the development of most members of the group and continues to be shown more than a decade later.”
Roar! :and Quieter Moments from a group of Melbourne artists, 1980–1993 - Traudi Allen, Craftsman House, c1995
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