Category Archives: Art & Photography

Art & Photography, Books, History & Heritage

Ray Atkins: The Reading Years

Exhibition catalogue for Ray Atkins: The Reading Years
Reading Museum, Reading Foundation for Art

Ray Atkins has been painting outside, often on a monumental scale, since the 1960s, and exhibiting nationally, undistracted by calls that painting was dead in the 1970s or that conceptual art was the only way forward. Today his painting is inspiring a new generation of young painters.

He lived in Reading from 1968 to 1974 while the town was changing radically. The Inner Distribution Road swept through the town centre, medieval streets made way for civic buildings and a shopping centre an on the outskirts the M4 was built. Ray observed them all.

‘Ray Atkins uses the outside world as a studio. The landscapes emerge from day to day involvement with an ever changing subject which is finally committed to a specific visual experience. I have admired these extraordinary paintings for many years.’ – Leon Kossoff, 2003

Art & Photography, Books

Robert Gillmor: Cover Birds

Cover Birds, by Robert Gillmor
Two Rivers Press

We are delighted to be working again with internationally acclaimed wildlife artist Robert Gillmor for Two Rivers Press.

Gillmor was already a keen bird-watcher at the age of 11 when the Reading Ornithological Club (launched in 1947) invited him to join them as a visitor; at 13 he was elected as their first junior member.  He was also learning the art of lino-cutting at Leighton Park School, and the Club’s 1949 annual report bore his linocut of a Canada Goose on its first printed cover. Over sixty years on he is still producing his wonderful representations of birds for the covers, particularly the more interesting sightings of each year. This book is the story of his formative bird-watching and print-making years. Illustrated with the images from the covers themselves, it is a beguiling account of the development of both artist and bird-lover.

Art & Photography, Books

Robert Gillmor: Birds, Blocks & Stamps

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Birds, Blocks & Stamps: Post & Go Birds of Britain
Two Rivers Press

  • Birds, Blocks & Stamps by Robert Gillmor
  • Birds, Blocks & Stamps by Robert Gillmor
  • Birds, Blocks & Stamps by Robert Gillmor
  • Birds, Blocks & Stamps by Robert Gillmor
  • Birds, Blocks & Stamps by Robert Gillmor


Robert Gillmor, one of the UK’s most prolific wildlife artists, has been commissioned by Royal Mail to produce a series of linocuts for four sets of Post & Go stamps featuring native birds of Britain.

Birds, Blocks & Stamps reproduces these prints together with Gillmor’s own account of the process by which his linocuts are made.

Visiting the artist at his Norfolk home to and seeing the studio where is all happens was the highlight of our summer.

  • Birds, Blocks & Stamps by Robert Gillmor
  • Birds, Blocks & Stamps by Robert Gillmor
  • Birds, Blocks & Stamps by Robert Gillmor
  • Birds, Blocks & Stamps by Robert Gillmor