BIOGRAPHY

I was born and raised on a council estate on the southern edge of Leeds. Acres of fields and woods were just beyond our backdoor, as much as an education to me as anything I got from school. I did not realise at the time just how much of an impression those places would make upon me.

I’ve drawn all my life, and started seeing my work published in zines and independent magazines from my late teens onwards. Throughout the 1990’s I did an untold amount of work for the underground and independent press, seeing my work published all across the world in too many titles to remember. It was a wild ride but by the early ’00’s I was burning out and looking for something better suited to my maturing sensibilities.

Becoming a father slowed me down for a while, and when I came back to art I realised the old impetus had left me. I hit 40 and realised the only thing I hadn’t tried was painting. I started teaching myself how to do it, and gradually the themes that would be my defining body of work began to assert themselves, drawn right from those formative years wandering the wild places just beyond the garden wall.

My entire philosophy is best summed up by the following words, written by Henry Beston in December 1926:

Nature – there is my country.
The work – to celebrate, to reveal the mystery,
the beauty, and the rites of Nature, of the
Visible World.
To bind this feeling to my name.

E: rik.rawling@gmail.com