School of Art

Contact Details

School of Art
Aberystwyth University
Buarth Mawr
Aberystwyth
Ceredigion
SY23 1NG

Tel: +44 (0)1970 622460

Fax: +44 (0)1970 622461

Email: artschool@aber.ac.uk

Display artist/maker:

John Ridgewell

Born: 1937, UK, England, Essex, Halstead   Died: 2004, UK, England, Suffolk, Bury St. Edmund's

Born in 1937 in Essex, Ridgewell had many solo and group exhibitions in his lifetime, from the 1960s through to the early 2000s. For the first years he exhibited in the UK but then he expanded in the 1970s to Sweden, Austria, and North America. In the 1980s he even exhibited in South Africa. He also worked to direct commissions from the 1980s to the early 2000s, until he became too ill to paint. He studied at Colchester School of Art, 1954-58, and then the Royal College of Art, 1958-61, sharing his time there with David Hockney, who was born in the same year as Ridgewell. He began his career as a teacher but stopped in 1966 to concentrate on painting. He was a printmaker and an oil painter of English landscapes who occasionally included an unusual element in his pictures, influenced by Surrealism, Georges Braque, and 17th century Dutch and Flemish paintings. He was inspired by his surroundings, the solid clay cliffs of the Yorkshire coast. Later, his work became lighter in terms of colour, but more intricate in their subject matter. The viewer can see the method of working in the paint itself, which he built up using brushes and a palette knife. He had not only one influence, but multiple, and this drifted into a vague sense of blue in the distance in his later paintings, as in his canvas Tree House. In his later years he lived in Bury St Edmund’s, Suffolk, and he died there on 25 September 2004.

Objects in the collections associated with this artist/maker

Buildings and River OP257 Oil Paintings



 
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