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3 As a senior tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art, Paul Richards belongs to an extensive list of distinguished artists who have taught there, including Frank Auerbach, Paula Rego, Lucian Freud and Stanley Spencer, and like whom he has developed an expressionist style with which to explore the human form. Bordering on abstraction, Richards captures the very essence of his sitters through nuances of line and seemingly spontaneous, gestural marks. For his sixtieth birthday, Richards received a book on Rembrandt's ink drawings. Long interested in the psychological dramas at play in Old Master pictures, this moving gift gave him the impetus to study the work of Rembrandt in much closer detail. Captivated by the masterful self-portraits and images of family and friends, he was particularly struck by the inherent power within the simplicity and directness of pen and ink on paper : "I believe they were Rembrandt thinking aloud, they appeared to me images of thought. More powerful than say Freudian analysis". What he recognised was the very quality which directs his own practice: the desire to distil the complex personality and spirit of each individual through a searching visual language. Not long after his birthday, Richards relocated from London – having spent his entire career there so far – to start the next chapter of his life in Oxford. Visiting the Ashmolean Museum's impressive Old Master collection, he was drawn to the ink drawings by Bellini, Raphael and Michelangelo. He recalls how these moved him to tears. Still in the process of creating a large studio to paint in, at this time he began to work on a series of drawings on paper, echoing the portraits of these artists: "What I was thinking when I made them, was to keep it simple, using just pen, ink and water in order to get as close to the subject as possible. I discovered that I was able to pick up and draw an emotional presence between the subjects and myself. Drawing in pen and ink gives me the chance to find something fresh, a route to a more intense reality". Whilst referencing the Old Master pictures from which he took inspiration, his drawings are characterised by their strikingly contemporary feel. Due to the expressive nature of his work, Richards has long been associated with the School of London painters. Each of these pictures possesses a textural quality akin to the densely painted, scraped-away early drawings of Auerbach and Kossoff. However, in their emotional intensity, they speak of a language closer to Bacon or Freud.