Roy Avis

Biography

Born in Greenwich, London in 1945, it is fitting that Roy paints London scenes. He has spent his life seeing the beautiful metropolitan skyline change, and where else than from Greenwich can you see London change the most? Roy’s compositions focus on capturing the introduction of a Roy Avis new building to the horizon or highlighting how a building is lit, and studying its effect on the shape of the skyline and its relationship with the Thames. Like many artists before him he enjoys painting the contrast of man’s artificial impact on the earth with the natural reflections of water and how light plays between them. However the city inhabits only the bottom fifth of the paintings, allowing room for magnificent skies which with changing moods and cloudscapes add a narrative element to tell the story of the city. How light plays and bends in the city’s pollution, celestial reflections from sodium lights – even dust and fine sand from a far distant storm swept over to our shores - creates a changing horizon line above cloud level to the clear night sky. Roy paints in a scale mimicking the expanse of a vista we too often take for granted. It gives his work a double horizon with three bands – water separating cloud and sky with a band of city, then sky, seemingly separated from space by ozone – the limit of man’s impact – with the unknowable expanse of space beyond. Roy is painstaking in his attention to detail, almost as if he was a cartographer and chronicler of the city, and not an artist.