Ray Belletty

I was born and raised in London. I did a degree in graphic design at St Martin’s School of Art and then later a Masters degree in illustration at The Royal College of Art. Both degrees had little to do with the commercial world of art and design. The emphasis was on personal expression, creating your own path and following your obsessions. After graduating I worked as an illustrator and then later as a designer/art director in publishing. 

Over the last two decades I have spent a quarter of the year in Northern Ireland. I started taking up painting directly on location in Northern Ireland about 5 years ago. I enjoyed the process of creating images without the increasingly binding commercial restraints. Plus, I was able to utilise the skills, ideas and vision I had developed and apply them to something different but related.

In those five years I have been studying traditional and modern techniques of painting and the science of colour and light. Which has given me the tools to look at a landscape or a scene and recreate it into something that I find intriguing, exciting and poetic. My location paintings are rarely literal or topographic. They are my interpretation, of that view, at that moment in time.