WELCOME

Born in London, Ray Osborn has lived, worked and painted in Ireland for over 30 years. A professional artist with a background in commercial design, Ray currently works in watercolour and acrylic producing vibrant and exquisitely rendered works celebrating the Irish landscape and outlook. Having undertaken many commissions and exhibitions in Irish galleries his paintings are now in corporate and private collections in Ireland, Europe, the U.S., Canada, the Middle East, the Far East, Australia and New Zealand. In 2006 he was commissioned by the Office of Public Works to produce a series of paintings of St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin.

Since 2002, Raymond has had shows in the Watergate theatre in Kilkenny, South Tipperary Arts Centre, Garter Lane Arts Centre in Waterford and the Old Market House Arts Centre in Dungarvan, with a residency in the Cill Riallig Project in Co. Kerry. He exhibits annually in the Kilkenny Arts Festival.

“I find the inspiration for my work all around me and for much of the time I paint in an impressionistic representational style, using the versatility of the medium to create light and atmosphere. Sometimes I like to introduce an element of design by breaking up the image into areas of reflected light so that viewers may feel they are observing the scene before them not directly, but through a pane of polished glass. The challenge of trying to capture the vitality and movement of a busy streetscape or stillness of landscape is one that strongly appeals to me.

Sometimes I disregard the laws of perspective to achieve a more balanced composition when designing these pieces, and often use a collage of different papers to which I apply washes of watercolour or acrylic, with brushes and rollers, to produce a variety of surface treatments emphasising the textures and contours found in the landscape, without losing the recognisable image of a particular place.”