Michael F. Rumsby is a British artist whose expressive landscape paintings are shaped by a life lived across multiple continents and an eye trained to find the extraordinary in the specific quality of light that a particular place, at a particular hour, makes available. Brought up on the Suffolk coast with views of the North Sea — a wilderness that he credits with shaping his entire visual sensibility — he has spent his adult life pursuing that quality of light across the south of France, the Mediterranean coast, the Algarve, Dubai, Italy, and Australia.
His path to full-time painting was characteristically unconventional. After studying art and art history at the University of Lancaster, he spent years climbing the corporate ladder before becoming Global Communications Director for the L'Oréal Group in Paris — a role that involved extensive travel and sustained exposure to one of the world's most creatively ambitious organisations. He participated every year in L'Oréal's amateur art exhibition before deciding in 2010 that the time had come to quit corporate life entirely. He has never looked back.
He works in a vibrant array of mixed media — oil, pencil, charcoal, pastels, and ink — building expressive, layered surfaces that capture the colour and tonality of landscapes seen with absolute attention. He paints on location wherever possible, the immediacy of the light changing his palette in ways that studio work cannot replicate, before returning inside to complete works at a scale that outdoor painting cannot accommodate. "My work is like a collage of different elements brought together to create one landscape," he has said.
He is fascinated by skies — particularly when they are, as he puts it with a smile, "doing something crazy." His Negresco, Borrowed Sundays, and Forbidden Fruit works — set along the Côte d'Azur — bring this atmospheric intelligence to the world of luxury leisure with the warmth of someone who inhabits that world rather than merely observing it. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts since 2014 and holds an ongoing residency with British Polo Day. His work hangs in private collections across Europe, the Middle East, the United States, and Australia, and in the boardroom of Risk Capital Partners' Mayfair offices. Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.
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