Richard Bolingbroke

Richard Bolingbroke was born in Southsea, England in 1952, and grew up in the south of England. He took a pre-diploma art course at Winchester Art College in 1969 and then went on to study Geography at London University in 1970. He graduated with a B.Sc. in Geography in 1973, having continued to paint in an unused laboratory on campus. He traveled to India in 1976, and lived there for five years on a life-defining spiritual journey studying and meditating. He returned to Europe in 1981 living briefly in Amsterdam, and then moved to the United States on Thanksgiving Day 1981. After a cold winter on the East coast he moved west, spending four years in Oregon and lived briefly in Phoenix. He moved to his current home in San Francisco, California, in 1986. As an artist his work has embraced many phases and styles. During his single year at art school, sculpture and photography were his main areas of work, but later explorations led to a greater interest in painting, especially conceptual and philosophical questions about time, creativity and the nature of reality. He also discovered his lifelong obsession with color as the primary force in painting. While traveling, he taught himself watercolor due to its ease of use on the road,painting landscapes as he worked his way across Asia to India. He began working in still-life when he arrived in San Francisco and it has remained his principle genre since then although he returned to the theme of landscape with a series of images of trees in the California landscape in chalk pastels and oils. Watercolor is still his primary medium, however his recent purchase of a printing press has allowed him to work with monotype printmaking. Using this process he has created two new series, Space/Time and Meditations on the Square. Investigations of pattern and color sparked by Japanese kimonos has developed into the watercolor series Rituals and Meditations in which the artists’ keen observation of nature and has turned inwards to look at the duality of phenomena. A selection of work from the watercolor series Rituals and Meditations is touring museums in the U.S.