BEN RAVENSCROFT
Lives and works in southeast London
Only the Painting Remains
Ben Ravenscroft is a British painter whose work explores the inner logic of painting—how marks accumulate meaning, how gestures resist or align with intention, and how surfaces can be built to both conceal and reveal. Working primarily on aluminium panels, Ravenscroft approaches painting as a conversation rather than a declaration. He’s less interested in delivering fixed ideas than in constructing systems that allow painting to think for itself.
His current works begin with engraved aluminium surfaces—an echo of his early printmaking—that serve as both preparation and ritual. Ravenscroft likens this to sweeping the floor before a sculpture, as Richard Long once described: a gesture that’s less about cleaning and more about arriving. Onto this primed terrain, he lays down gestural white undercoats that appear loose but in fact build a compositional logic. From there, glazes are layered—sometimes bright, sometimes near-black—creating a play of opacity, transparency, and visual contradiction. Colour, surface, and space continually shift roles.
He first encountered painting’s potential at age fifteen, when finishing a work sparked a realisation: this wasn’t just a hobby, but a way of being. He studied in Hastings before joining Goldsmiths during its most experimental years. There, he quickly understood that being an artist didn’t mean one thing—it meant defining your own terms. Drawing remained an important practice for him, but it was the physical nature of etching and the architecture of printed surfaces that quietly reshaped his future approach to painting.
For Ravenscroft, a painting must do something before it can say anything. Each work is a tightly held structure that allows surprise to happen—where control and accident share the same canvas. He often returns to ideas from earlier bodies of work, not to repeat them, but to revisit unfinished questions with the insight time has afforded.
Ravenscroft’s paintings resist spectacle. Instead, they offer sustained looking—asking viewers to spend time with subtleties that unfold slowly. As he puts it, “no matter what you say, in the end you are left with the object.” And for him, the object—the painting—must always carry its own voice.
Strange Forms and Good Solutions
Camden Art Centre — File Note 09: Ben Ravenscroft & Sam Basu
A thoughtful text on Ravenscroft’s collaboration with Sam Basu, exploring material process and architectural ideas.
