About & Contact

RICHARD A HORSMAN (British, b. 1969)

 “I’ve always been fascinated by colour; Lego bricks as a child, bright postage stamps in the 1970s, followed by the primary-on-black contrasts of 1980s video games. You’ll find this motif of vivid colours and structured patterns runs through the majority of my work.

I’ve spent the last 20 years creating images that add detail to relatively simple starting points; adding structure where none existed or deconstructing and rebuilding. Over this time my pictures have been seen all over the world after being featured in many international magazines.

I like to take what is traditionally a flat image – a portrait, a sketch, a video game character maybe – and work on it to produce something that retains much of the original, but adds depth and abstraction. Imagine a photograph divided into small squares. If you look at each square in turn you can average out the colours in that square to give the whole square a new colour. That colour already has a place in 2D space, but what about the third dimension? Maybe we decide that this square’s brightness will dictate where it sits in 3D space? Or maybe we use this square as a starting point for a stacked 3D model and build up, randomly, away from the ‘ground’? Now let’s change each square into something that really is three-dimensional. A Lego brick makes a perfect replacement. But Lego bricks only come in certain colours, so let’s find the nearest match and drop that brick in place. And look, there are too single Lego bricks of the same colour next to each other…. Let’s combine them into a bigger brick…. And so the experimentation and refinement process continues…

When viewed from a distance some of my images reveal secrets that cannot be seen close up. Conversely, closer viewing reveals detail unseen at a distance. Imagine how this effect manifests itself when a piece is viewed from different distances while walking towards it along a long corridor – the subject gradually being revealed followed by further detail inherent in the chosen medium.

Try it for yourself… step back… can you see it now? No? Squint! Now open your eyes and step forward.”