Richard Elliott

Concrete Stairs, Ramsgate

Jackson's Art Prize 2025
Watercolour
Panel, Paper
120 x 120 cm

£3,500

“My architectural interest finds focus in Twentieth Century buildings, from the ‘International Style’ to Brutalism, and more recently, contemporary communal architecture, depicting places of transit such as airports, shopping malls and train stations. These spaces are often privately owned and scrupulously maintained, polished and cleaned, presenting us with an untouched, homogenised world, very much in opposition to our everyday, domestic environment. The work is distilled through endless amounts of photography, edited and simplified and then painted large scale with watercolour in a technique that does not allow for corrections. My paintings offer unpopulated re-readings of these modern-day cathedrals to consumerism and, like the church, their congregations are beginning to dwindle. The paintings reference architects’ idealised illustrations, using the softer quality of watercolour to render these clinical, hard-edged modern spaces. Removed of people, these images often sit on the borderline of abstraction, as anchors to scale and orientation are removed.”