Bruce Risdon - Biography in Brief
On completion of the foundation course in Shrewsbury in 1987, Bruce Risdon then takes a gap decade in Coventry, Working in various warehouses, night clubs and pubs in various different job descriptions, Risdon returns to his passion via Coventry Artists Cooperative. Attending regular life drawing session to build up a portfolio, which gains him entrance into the art school at Swansea Institute of Higher Education. graduating with a 2.1 in 1999. Whilst working as a trainee bar manager joins Swansea Guild of Artists and helps with opening of Exposure Gallery. By 2004 Risdon becomes self employed and continues to paint, exhibit, and help in the running of the gallery.
Biography in detail
Bruce Risdon - My Life Story
For as long as I can recall I have been drawing or painting in one way or another. I remember when I was about four or five my very first lesson in drawing. I grew up in a leafy cul-de-sac in Shropshire which was popular with walkers and hikers. One day, two elderly gentlemen, out for a stroll, stopped to sketch our house. They gave the sketch to my father who then showed it to me. I was instantly fascinated, and wanted to know how they had magically recreated our house in pencil on a scrap of lined paper. My father took me to the spot where they must have drawn it from, and with his own pencil and paper started to show me how they had used one line for this wall and a triangle shape for the gable and so on. Since then I’ve always been scribbling or daubing.
My grandfather was a professional gardener, and good friends with Percy Thrower one of the first television gardeners, and my mother had inherited his green fingers. Consequently "Risdon Acres" was full of form and colour the whole year round. In 1977, the year of the Queens silver jubilee, I was in primary school. My teacher, to encourage my artistic endeavours, had me standing on a cupboard to paint a huge rendition of Buckingham palace with rows of guards in bearskins and red tunics. I researched it with pictures from books and magazines, and on completion, although admired by many, even at the age of 9 I was unhappy with the result and wondered how I could improve on it. Never the less it was a good way of getting out of maths. By the mid eighties I was in sixth form doing my A-levels, where upon I drew a self-portrait in oil pastels. It was so true to life that other pupils would approach me and say "that's you isn't it?" The likeness is still there although the black crimped spikey mop of hair has gone. I did my foundation at Shrewsbury College where I became interested in etching, spending half the year waxing metal plates and suspending them in acid. The other six months I spent painting super-sized paintings of landscape studies in bright perceived colours. It was at Shrewsbury that I first started working with a model. Looking back these first attempts seem scratchy and clumsy, but I was encouraged to develop my work further, to transfer the life drawing, not the canvas, but to the etching plate where nudes where recreated in etched line and aquatint. My knowledge of etching was, at the time, good enough for my busy tutor to ask me the following year to instruct his students in the printing process.
Directly after foundation, although it was felt I was a suitable candidate for university, I had the opportunity to travel to Australia. Whilst backpacking and visiting relatives I would fill many sketch books and send them home. I was inspired by the light and the colourful landscape and people. I would embroil myself in Australian art, from aboriginal through to Russell Drysdale, Sidney Nolan, and right up unto contemporary Australian artist Ken Done. I would visit each gallery and museum in every town and city I would travel to, gathering new influences at every stop.
I applied to various colleges in Britain from "Oz" and attended a couple interviews on my return. My applications were not successful, for it seemed all my recent influences were not correlated into one coherent direction. I then started a period which I call my "gap decade."
At this time the country boy moved to the bright lights-big city of Coventry where friends from foundation were now studying. I got a job with a furniture company and shortly became warehouse manager and at night I worked in a large cabaret night club as head steward. But I was not idle on the creative front. I designed posters for the club, and local bands, and at one point produced an adult comic called Rizadelic Magzine. It was Viz spin-off with send ups of local characters along with others characters of my own invention.
Unfortunately the strain of working day and night took it's toll and I ended up with a serious illness. I was in and out hospital for over a year, receiving various operations and taking some time to recuperate. It was at this stage that began making drawings and sketches, I suppose in a kind of Frida Kahlo way, about the pain I had just experienced. These drawings were very cathartic yet amateur and naïve and longed to improve my skills. It was then, in the early nineties, that I joined a life drawing group where once a week we would have a different model to study. I started painting in oils and after a year or so had built a not unimpressive portfolio, through which I gained offers a place in Coventry University, and Swansea Institute of Higher Education.
Although at the time Coventry reputation was quite progressive I chose Swansea because it offered the city life that I had become accustomed to, and the greenery that I missed from youth, with the added bonus of the coast. So it was in 1996 that I went from being "sent to Coventry" to arrive in "the graveyard of ambition", enrolling in Rob Newell's Painting and Drawing degree course in the autumn of that year.
I graduated in 1999 with a 2:1, not however in Painting and Drawing, but in Fine Art, for over the three year period I had become interested in video and film theory. In my final show I had videos playing along side paintings which themselves appeared to be stills of film never made.
On leaving college I secured the position of assistant manager of, strangely enough, an Australian theme pub, I was Bruce of Bar Oz! I spent the next couple of years training to be a licensee whilst still painting in the attic rooms above the pub. Although I was producing and exhibiting paintings I felt the work load of artist and publican too great, and left the bar and Swansea in the spring of 2002. I spent the summer back in Shropshire with my family, gathering my thoughts, and restoring a classic motor cycle. By the autumn myself and the motorbike were ready. I rode back to Swansea to complete a previously commissioned painting of Swansea Bay, determined to sustain myself as an artist. (with the occasional stint as a builders labourer!)
In 2003 I managed to persuade the good people of Aberdare Museum to allow me to have my first solo exhibition. Later that year I was approached by Swansea Guild of Artists, who were opening their, now established, Exposure Gallery, and because my work was exhibition ready, I had the privilege of having my second solo exhibition as their first. By spring 2005 I had successfully completed my first year of business as a self employed artist.