COASTEROLLER – The graphic works of Ray Richardson will be on show at Jack House Gallery, Portsmouth until May 19.

Ray Richardson works out of his Thameside Studio spitting distance from the places and people he draws and paints and his beloved Charlton Football club.

His pictures are funny, bleak, warm and affectionate and full of ambiguous narrative.

Pictorial references to crime fiction, particularly the world of James Ellroy, and the classic film noir gangsters, hustlers and 'dodgy' characters of British movies abound.

Ray continues a tradition of story telling in painting that can be traced back to Hogarth and Hopper in finding beauty and incident in the unprepossessing streets of South East London.

Ray has been described as the ‘Scorsese’ of the art world because of his panoramic cinematic approach to composition and his interest in painting dodgy blokes loitering on used car lots and seedy corners of London and, in fact, he has worked on the set of some recent British crime movies.

But the lead character of his artworks goes to his splendid English Bull terrier WeeBri.

Coasteroller is a solo show of prints, drawings and paintings for an artist who shows all over the world .