Richard Pike was born in Leeds, U.K. in 1948. After living in London for nearly forty years, minus a few years in New York, he moved to Marsden in the South Pennines, where he now lives and works from his studio.
Pike studied at Harrogate School of Art, St. Martin's School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools in London, later working as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator, before becoming a part-time lecturer in drawing and painting.
Pike’s work often responds to experiences of the landscape and the memories held within them. Concerned with this inner/outer duality and what he terms our ‘collective internal landscape’, Pike’s practice is informed by myriad sources, from the study of ancient religious rituals to modernist philosophy and science. Distilling vast amounts of almost limitless visual and textual material, his paintings contain references as varied as 1950s fairground art, Old Testament quotations, weather charts, Ted Hughes poems, anatomy manuals, mechanical toys and illustrations from magicians’ handbooks.
Each work begins life as a physical painting, using acrylics, inks, pastels and graphite, which is then digitised and further developed as a mixed-media digital image. In a process which has parallels with the functioning of memory, the original painting is then destroyed, allowing ‘The Print’ to become ‘The Original’ – an image of an internal landscape.