Graduated from Central Saint Martins in 1984 and Goldsmiths in 1987, he quickly stood out by winning his first British Council Award in 1989 and the BP Portrait Award the following year.
Ray Richardson paints everyday life scenes based on his own experience: his native area of South-East London, travel memories or personal concerns expressed through his emblematic double, an English Bull Terrier. He shapes this material by combining "the traditional stuff of painting with the cinematic ways of looking at things" (close-up, elongated horizontal formats, use of light and perspective) that has earned him the nickname of "Martin Scorsese of figurative painting".
His sophisticated framings refer both to pictorial tradition (William Hogarth, Edward Hopper, British landscapes paintings, abstract expressionism) and to contemporary popular cultures (American street photography, film noir, James Ellroy novels, mods subculture, Soul music, football). Mixing humor, drama and irony, Ray Richardson's narrative painting depicts a whole social and peripheral panorama, the one of working and middle-class.
In 2015, he was part of the group show Reality: Modern & Contemporary British Painting at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, celebrating the strength of British painting with some of its most influential artists of the last 60 years, such as Francis Bacon, Cecily Brown, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Paula Rego, George Shaw, Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer. He has been the recipient of several prizes and his work is part of many public and private collections: Victoria and Albert Museum, Fondation Carmignac, The National Portrait Gallery, Ingram Collection, Ruth Borchard Collection…