Ophelia Redpath
Born in 1965 into an artistic family with two grandparents as painters, Ophelia was encouraged in her drawing and painting early on. After school she completed an Art Foundation Course at CCAT, Cambridge in 1984. With music as a great passion, she considered taking it up professionally and studied music and education at Homerton College, Cambridge. However, dissatisfied with the course, she left after a year and took up full-time painting.
She had her first exhibition in 1986 at the Benslow Music Festival in Hitchin, after which she exhibited in numerous Cambridge Colleges including Clare Hall, Clare College, Fitzwilliam College and Churchill College. Other Cambridge Galleries, which have shown her work, include the Jean Pain Gallery, the Gallery on the Cam, Heffers Art Gallery, the Bridge Street Design, Wysing Arts, The Broughton House Gallery, Business Arts, The Old Fire Engine Ely, Primavera and The Darryl Nantais Gallery in Linton, Cambridgeshire.
She has also exhibited in London, beginning with cafes and wine bars, progressing to galleries, including Foyles Art Gallery, Smith’s Galleries in Covent Garden, the Mall Galleries, Dragon International Design Company, Big Ben Clocks and The Barbican.
For the last 20 years she has supported herself with these exhibitions, and over this period her style and medium have gradually developed. Beginning her career with designs both abstract and decorative in various media, including gouache, ink, collage, she slowly moved towards a more figurative approach where people and animals became her main focus of interest. Now she specialises in genre scenes of people where their eccentricities, tastes, occupations, moods and relationships are recorded with deeply vivid colours in oil on canvas or paper, and oil pastel and gouache on paper. Recently Shakespeare has been her main inspiration, resulting in offbeat interpretations of quotations from his plays.
Primavera has a collection of 8 original paintings from Ophelia.