Ron Sandford

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Personal vignettes from a life in Hong Kong, Shetland, and travels in Italy. Ron Sandford’s paintings communicate his lived experience of these culturally and geographically distinct environments through commonplace items, often before deftly captured backdrops.

For 30 years, Ron illustrated books and newspapers and undertook large scale architectural commissions such as Bishopsgate, London. He has taught at the Royal College of Art, Central School of Art and Design, St. Martin’s School of Art and Brighton School of Art. From his studio on Yell, Shetland, he draws the everyday, every day: still life, landscape and portrait in pencil, pen, ink and watercolour.

In the mid 1980s, Ron settled in Lamma, a small island off Hong Kong. A sort of paradise is how he described it. Living on the edge of pre-handover China and close to Macau, he was drawn to Chinese vernacular architecture as well as life as he found it around him. After 6 years, Ron and his family moved to another island: Yell, almost as far north as you can go in the UK.  From the windows of his studio and home, Ron looks across the Bluemull sound to Unst. A distinctive cleft in the cliff face defiantly sits in the backdrop of many pictures, a recurring motif like the container ships that lurk in the background of his Hong Kong work.