Artist CV

Ron Caines was born in Bristol and studied painting at the West of England College of Art, where he also obtained a degree from Bristol University.  He was awarded prizes for painting by Jack Smith, and Professor Andrew Forge.  He was taught by the abstract painter Paul Feiler.

Initially working in a committed abstract expressionist, collage based style, making a connection with New York Jazz of that period, he was unimpressed by the meretriciousness of Pop Art. Also disinterested in the blank rhetoric of minimalism, and the anti-painting ethos of Conceptual art

At that point he became involved in music, working  in Europe and U.K. with East of Eden, part of the  youth, alternative counter-culture movement of the time. He later picked up painting in the late 1970s, making water colour landscapes, directly painted mainly in Italy.

Taught life drawing at Bristol Polytechnic and was chairperson of the Artists Union.
Shared in the Post Modern reassessment of artists such as de Chirico and Morandi which influenced his work.
Moved to Brighton, painting full time in 1995. Reconnected with the modernist canon after seeing 'The Music Lesson' by Matisse in New York.

“This is one of the pictures on show here which invites a second glance, which suggests that we follow through its complex of lines and planes. Nothing is finally resolved; there is no optimum point where breath and expansiveness stand clear. Nevertheless these qualities are intimated, there to be caught and lost in the modulation of tone and colour.It is a work in which emergence is embodied. I see and am made aware of how I see, and to what end I look”

Ian Jeffrey,  Artscribe  No 16., describing a painting by Ron Caines at the Arnolfini Gulbenkian Enquiry Exhibition.



Selected Exhibitions

Young Contemporaries, London
Arnolfini, Bristol
Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions
West of England Academy, Autumn Exhibitions
Sussex Open, Brighton Art Gallery
The Discerning Eye, London
The New English Art Club, London
Brighton Festival
Alpha House Gallery Sherborne
Ainscough Contemporary, Fulham
Hazlett, Gooden and Fox, London
Innocent Fine Art, Bristol
Tregoning Gallery, Derby

Currently represented by Rob Whittle Fine Art