Rackstraw Downes (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Rackstraw Downes (born 1939) is a British-born realist painter and author. His oil paintings are notable for their meticulous detail accumulated during months of plein-air sessions, socially provocative narratives depicting human industry's engagement with the environment, and compositional rigor manifest in the balancing of structural abstraction and perspectival extension. Born Rodney Harry Rackstraw Downes in Pembury, Kent, England, he moved to the United States and studied painting as an exchange student at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut from 1957-58. He then returned to England and attended Cambridge University, where he received a B.A. in English literature. Back in the United States, he studied at the Yale School of Art with Neil Welliver, Al Held and Alex Katz, and received an M.F.A. in painting in 1964.