Richard has often appeared on these pages since he moved to Barga with his family over a decade ago – In 2002 English landscape artist Richard Clare and his family came to Barga just for a holiday, but the magical beauty of Barga seduced them into buying a property here. Richard can often be seen wandering around Barga’s alleyways with his box of paints, sketching and painting plein-air. complete article with many images of his very colourful landscapes can be seen here
Since then he has tried painting in the dark in Barga Vecchia making use of just the ambient street lighting (article here) and opening one of the smallest galleries in the city, only 7 metres long and not even two metres wide – in fact if you stood in the middle with outstretched arms it was possible to touch both walls but size had little importance when it came to quality and high quality there was to be found there (article here)
This afternoon he was back in the narrow streets of Barga Vecchia but this wearing a different hat, no longer the lone painter but instead, the tutor as he was here with a group of students all eager to soak up the sun and try their hand at capturing some of those fleeting movements of light in amongst the centuries old buildings in the city.
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A brief on hands tutorial from Richard then it every man /woman for themselves as the five painters from the USA dipped their brushes and started work.
Award-winning landscape artist Richard Clare is known for his colourful and dynamic paintings of the northern landscape of England, and more recently of Tuscany (Barga) where he lives most of the time.
Making most of the hot climate, Richard paints plein-air. For his moorland inspired works, he goes back several times a year to his studio in Delph, on the edge of the English Pennines, creating his vibrant paintings from memory or sketches (never photographs), using colours which are not normally associated with the British landscape.
For Richard, the final picture is only one part of the painting process, since he spends a lot of time sketching, walking in the landscape and soaking up the atmosphere. Back in the studio, inspired by these sketches and his emotions, he paints very quickly to get these impressions down on canvas. Hence his preference for using acrylics and oils applied predominantly with painting knives to create soft watercolour effects and heavy impasto marks.
