British artist Ripley works with high resolution digital composite photography in combination with extensive work in post-production to create large-scale artworks.
Notable equine works include the portrait of ‘Estimate’ which Ripley created for Queen Elizabeth II in 2016, and portraits with ‘Pivotal’, ‘California Chrome’, ‘Big Bucks’, ‘Cracksman’, and the piece ‘Leopard Spotted Horse with Dalmatians in a Landscape’. View gallery 1.
Ripley has recently completed a series of portraits of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment. View gallery 2.
A boxed-set of the twelve portraits was the official Coronation present from the Household Cavalry to His Majesty King Charles III. This was presented by Ripley and senior officers from the Household Cavalry to King Charles III at Buckingham Palace on June 15th 2023.
Limited edition prints range from large-scale pieces and a beautifully presented boxed-set, to smaller print editions and greeting cards.
The imagery features soldiers from The Life Guards and the Blues and Royals mounted on their horses and posed on buildings throughout London, overlooking the capital from Trafalgar Square to Canary Wharf.
The portraits are being exhibited at various public and private venues throughout 2023 & 2024. Please see the exhibition page for details.
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Method
Ripley creates artworks using high-resolution digital photography in combination with extensive work in post-production. This process gives him the foundation upon which to produce work of extremely fine detail, clarity and scale.
Working at magnifications of over one-thousand percent, every element of the picture is crafted to the width of a single pixel, something unachievable with the human eye or by using traditional painting or drawing techniques, the resulting level of detail is remarkable.
When composing a portrait Ripley photographs each element separately in order to satisfy a number of technical and artistic objectives, this includes the main subject, skies, landscapes, cityscapes, abstract surfaces and architectural features.
Constructing the picture is more complex than it may at first appear; scenes are often composed from multiple photographs and may comprise of panoramas many pictures wide and many layers deep, with shifts of focus throughout the image. This time-intensive process means that 99% of the picture is rendered sharp and in-focus by eliminating many of the optical depth-of-field artefacts normally associated with traditional photography.
Ripley assembles the image using retouching and drawing techniques developed over thirty years, this process can take many weeks (or months) to complete depending on the complexity of the image..
View Ripley's history in creating imagery here.
