ABOUT

Ruby Read is a British oil painter working in portraiture, still life, and botanical subjects. She paints in thick impasto oil, building up dense, textured surfaces with bold colour and visible, physical marks. Her work is held in the Travers Smith Collection, the Rise Art Collection, and the Pilgrm Hotel Collection.

She is a painter of people and things. She collects objects, anything that holds a trace of memory or use. She is drawn to beauty, but more specifically to what is singular, the quality in a person or a thing that makes it entirely itself.

In her portraits this shows up in the details others might overlook. A furrowed brow. Oversized ears. The particular way someone holds themselves. She has a fondness for caricature, not as distortion but as a kind of devotion, the way a great caricaturist locks onto a likeness and won't let go. She does something similar, with warmth.

Over the past few years she has taken this instinct into more expansive projects, painting large groups of portraits drawn from specific communities. Her degree show project at the Royal College of Art, "All the Wicked Are Here," comprised 150 small oil portraits of every student on her MA course, a work that was both intimate and epic in scope, exploring collective identity and the social dimensions of portraiture. It was highlighted by Blowout Magazine and London Art Roundup as a standout of the 2025 RCA Graduate Show. It suits her. Studio life can be isolating, and there is something she values in the sustained contact these projects demand, the time spent with people, not just looking at them.

Call her a portrait painter if you like, but it leaves out half the picture. Growing up in a home full of antiques and objects, colour everywhere, left its mark. Plants, trinkets, and things appear in her work with the same weight and attention as any face. Her botanical paintings and still life compositions share the same impasto technique and emotional directness as the portraits, thick oil paint applied generously, sometimes straight from the tube, building surfaces that feel almost sculptural.

Ruby approaches paint the way she approaches cooking, experimentally, generously, with a loaded brush and no interest in being precious about it. The surfaces she builds are thick, worked, sometimes applied with a palette knife. You can feel the layers of decision-making underneath. The result is often luscious and icing-like, colour-rich and deeply physical. There is something of Frank Auerbach and Emilio Villalba in the worked surfaces, Lucian Freud in the bodily weight, and a hint of John Currin's sly, off-kilter humour.

She is based between London and Shropshire, shaped by a childhood in Shrewsbury. She completed a First Class BA in Fine Art Painting at Camberwell College of Arts and her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2025. Following her MA she was selected for Tracey Emin's Victoria House Residency in Margate. She will undertake a further residency at Duplex in Lisbon later in 2026.

Original oil paintings by Ruby Read are available to purchase directly through this website. Commissions are considered on a case-by-case basis. To enquire, email ruby@rubyread.art.