Experimenting with art, colour and sound.
Featured in our Open Art Exhibition 2021, Lee Riley creates paintings that are crafted with layers of colour and texture and are what he calls ‘Colour Abstractions'. Being an experimental music artist and producer, many of his paintings are responses to music. Layers of paint emerge and dance on the canvas, similar to multi layered music featuring different layers of sounds or instrumentation.
Lee Riley has a visually creative background in the arts, studying graphic design and photography to BA (Hons) and HNC level. In 2012, he completed his Masters in Composition and Sonic Art at Oxford Brookes, and since then has rediscovered his interest in painting and printmaking which has led to the ‘Colour Abstractions' paintings he works on today.
Lee’s paintings begin from a loose and free-flowing starting point, each painting creating its own symphony, like in free improvisation. The outcome can take a few hours or days and paintings are often revisited by adding fresh layers of paint to add depth within the colours and composition.
Our Open Art Exhibition featured art work, ‘Colour In Mind’, was made over several days in June 2020. The painting shows a vibrant use of colour and depth, in relation to the layers of sound often found in Riley’s “drone soundscape” music works.