Best known for his huge landscape paintings, Ray Atkins is also a painter of the human figure. In the new enlarged Gallery, for the first time, we are able to bring together these two aspects of his practice.

Atkins’ extraordinary method of painting in the landscape by erecting structures to hold the large boards in place is well known. In the studio, painting the figure, his methods are equally unique and demanding and the works declare the same remarkable ambition in terms of their scale and the evident physical commitment in their making.

For this exhibition he has produced a series of paintings based on yoga positions, positions so physically strenuous that the model can only hold the pose for a minute or two, so that the paintings are made in a series of short explosive burst of energy as an impulsive response to the extraordinary poses. Describing the process, and the demands of working in this way, not just on one but a on the whole ‘yoga series’ of paintings, Atkins say that …“I prepared eight different surfaces, one for each pose, and when we worked we moved from one painting to another to give her a rest. During the course of a morning or the day, I was working on three or four different images. Physically moving the boards was bad enough but the mental strain of chopping and changing from one painting to another was incredible”.

Outdoors, Atkins continues to reveal the beauty and emotional power of a landscape scarred by human activity. His sites include his own garden with its gorse and bonfires, the slopes of Carn Marth outside Redruth, and Littlejohns Pit, a working china-clay pit on the highest point on Bodmin Moor, which he describes as …”spectacular, yet disturbing in its vastness with so many points of activity which are always changing,… The shifting light, the changing form, the bursts of activity in unexpected places with no likelihood of ever discovering any focal points.”

After leaving the Slade in 1964, Atkins’ work was included in numerous prestigious public exhibitions including a solo-exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1974. His move to remote Cornwall, and the shift in interest away from painterly figuration, signalled a quiet period, but since 1989 he has shown regularly at Art Space Gallery and has again been honoured with major solo exhibitions in public galleries including retrospectives at the Royal West of England Academy, the Long Gallery, Kilkenny, Ireland, Falmouth Art Gallery and Truro Art Gallery. He has work in the permanent collections of the Arts Council, British Council and the British Museum and in prestigious private collections in the UK, Germany and USA.