GALLERY

ILANA RICHARDSON

Ilana Richardson was born in Israel. She studied art at the Betzalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem and followed this with postgraduate courses in London. She returned to Israel for a while to work as a graphic designer and illustrator. However she returned to London in 1974 and has been based here ever since. To find fresh inspiration for her work Ilana travels extensively around the world from Singapore to Mexico and naturally the Mediterranean. She makes sketches and takes photographs in order to capture the brilliance of colour and the contrast of light and shadow.

Ilana is at her best depicting the interplay of light ad colour, favouring countries where the strong light enables her to contrast lush vegetation with the white walls of Mediterranean or tropical architecture. She seldom allows a human presence to intrude and one has the feeling that as one critic wrote 'you could almost imagine you are seeing a deserted paradise where nobody lives which is waiting somewhere for you to stumble across and inhabit'. Ilana finds watercolour gives her the right kind of subtly for her images and that she can work with the silkscreen process In the same way using the transparent inks to give a watercolour type wash on the paper. She has been making prints for over twenty years.