Richard Bolingbroke was born in Southsea, England in 1952, and grew up in the south of England. He took a pre-diploma art course at Winchester Art College in 1969 and then wenton to study Geography at London University in 1970. He graduated with a B.Sc. in Geography in 1973, having all the while continued to paint in an unused laboratory on campus.

He traveled to India in 1976, and lived there for five years on a life-defining spiritual journey. He returning to Europe in 1981 living briefly in Amsterdam, and then moved to the United Stateson Thanksgiving Day 1981. After a cold winter on the East coast he moved west, spending four years in Oregon, lived briefly in Phoenix, and moved to his current home in San Francisco, California, in 1986.

As an artist his work has embraced many phases and styles. At art school, sculpture and photography were his main areas of work, but later explorations led to a greater interest in painting, especially conceptual and philosophical questions about time, creativity and the nature of reality. He also discovered a lifelong obsession with color as primary force in painting.

While traveling, he taught himself watercolor due to its ease of use on the road,painting landscapes as he worked his way across Asia to India. He began working in still-life when he arrived in San Francisco and it has remained his principle genre since then although he recently returned to the theme of landscape with a series of images of trees in the California landscape in chalk pastels and oils.

While watercolor is still his primary medium, his recent purchase of a printing press has allowed him to continue his work with monotype printmaking. Recent investigations of pattern and color have resulted in complex watercolor images using Japanese kimonos and various personal objects from his studio. This work developed into the series Rituals and Meditations, which has continued Bolingbrokes’ keen observation of nature and turned it inwards to look at the duality of phenomena, such as Life and Death.

His shows in Washington D.C in 1998 and New York City in 1999 were well received, and he has showed his work on a regular basis in Florida since 1997, receiving several awards for the excellence of his work. In 2002 he had a career retrospective at the Atrium Gallery in San Francisco. Currently a selection of work from the series of watercolors called “Rituals and Meditations” is touring museums in the U.S