About | Richard Salter Art

Richard believes life started to mould creativity into his soul from a young age, he sort adventure as a teen and served 21 years in the British Army whilst studying fine Art at Buckinghamshire University. His artwork has been exhibited in parallel to his military career leading to multiple awards, museums adding his work to their collections, Royal Academicians writings and appearances on BBC shows where he was dubbed “a poet in paint” by Daphne Todd OBE and “a great story teller” by Lachlan Goudie.

Awards

2016 National Army Museum Award

2015 First Prize AAS, presented by Royal Academician Emma Stibbon

2015 National Army Museum Award

2015 Finalist, BBC's Big Painting Challenge

2015 Wilshire's GUL Exhibition First Prize

2014 Serving Artist First Prize AAS

2014 Best in Show RU - Army Art Society

2013 War Artist of the Year RU, Presented by Royal Academician Professor Ken Howard OBE

2013 Best in Show RU - Army Art Society

2012 Armed Forces Art Society Award

2011 National Army Museum Templar Award, Presented by Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir David Richards

Collectors

National Army Museum, London

Royal Signals Museum, Dorset

Kohima Museum, York

Private Collections include various celebrities

2014 – The Art of War – Castle Gallery, York, by Royal Academician Professor Ken Howard OBE

This exhibition of paintings by Richard Salter, entitled “The Art of War”, continues a long tradition from Uccello through to Goya and Monet. War as can be seen in the Imperial War Museum in London, has what can only be described as a “terrible beauty”. The paintings of Stanley Spenser, Paul Nash, William Orphen and Graham Sutherland, among others, prove this to be true. This is the tradition continued by Richard Salter, although unlike those already mentioned Richard has been a serving soldier whilst attaining a BA (Hons) in fine art. I first came across Richard’s work when asked to judge the Army Art Society Exhibition in Salisbury during late 2013 and awarded him the prize as War Artist of the Year. For me Art is about “Revelation”, a way of seeing, “Celebration”, saying something about one’s life and work and “Communication”, speaking to people directly in visual terms. Richard’s work is about all three. Above all else art must be life enhancing; it should enrich our lives by showing us something as it were for the first time which makes us see the world in a different way.

2015 – WOLF – Gallery 21, Salisbury, By Royal Academician Emma Stibbon

As both an artist and serving soldier Richard Salter paints his experiences from the heart. WOLF is an exhibition of new works that explore his observations of his physical surroundings often incorporating military symbols that are part of his familiar environment. His work draws on his experiences on Operations, and he reveals the exhibition ‘is based around my past experiences and fears, WOLF being the darkest fear that creeps around my unconscious’. I first encountered Richard’s work at the Army Arts Society’s 2015 Annual Exhibition at The Young Galleries, Salisbury and awarded him the Serving Soldier Prize for his beautifully rendered but disturbing small bronze sculpture ‘The Meaning of Life’. By juxtaposing a scarab beetle crawling over a hand grenade the work conveys a sense of anxiety.

The paintings in this exhibition focus on the vulnerable young people exposed to conflict, a recurring subject in his work. Richard asserts ‘the one thing that always stays with me is the children trapped in that environment…children who images still haunt me.’ Works such as ‘Smoke I’ and ‘Smoke II’ capture the feeling of waiting for relief, or ‘Scars’ where he incorporates the physical surface of the materials into the painting to suggest a physical tension in the work which hangs in the Army Museum, London. However despite the sombre subject matter he manages to convey a sense of beauty in the images reminding us of the power of art to communicate raw emotion that perhaps can’t be expressed in other ways.