Raymond Hosty was born in Tuam, Co.Galway. When aged 6 his family moved to England where his father set up a medical practise.

Raymonds school years were at the Jesuit college, St.Francis Xavier. Subsequently he schooled at Merchant Taylors and King Edward schools in Lytham, St.Annes.

During this period the family returned to Ireland for extended holidays mostly spent in Connemara, east Galway on the Beara Pennisula in west Cork, it was then that he developed a life time love affair with fresh water fishing, drawing, wilderness, landscape and monastic Ireland.

During his late teenage years he and his family returned to live in Ireland where he studied architecture at Bolton Street, and went on to practise in London and subsequently in Ireland but could never find the personal fulfilment he sought during these years.

During this period he painted and sketched continuously and also worked for a period in ceramics (alongside his wife, Maureen, who was a noted ceramicist). It was at this time he became interested in the great Kenzan pottery tradition and the thought process behind it, together with the strong Japanese emphasis on simplicity and beauty both in life and paintings, and here also he developed his interests in the Zen way as applied to life.

He then made the decision to leave architecture for a life of painting.

In his work Raymond Hosty is primarily interested in portraying mood, whether it be in his figurative work or in his landscape painting. In the figurative work he portrays the vulnerability and something of the comic futility of people in the face of life, but he hopes always with sympathy.

The landscapes are mostly wilderness places and again he is primarily concerned in capturing the unspoilt spare mood of such places and in consequence favours the elimination of extraneous detail to achieve the feeling he seeks. Sometimes the empty space in his painting becomes the object in his work, and again there is the desire for simplification and stylistic purity.

Artist statement:

It is easier for me to express myself through my work, and I believe that any true artists style is dictated by his or her temperament, and that it should be possible to know even the personality of the artist from the work.

I believe it is not necessary to paint on front of the real thing, as the idea is the imagination. Memory does not retain everything, but it retains only that which strikes the mind; the essential simplicity of things, and the elimination of useless detail.

Painting is a translation of feelings describing a condition. Descriptive work can be translated into language, so it has become pointless. My work both in figurative and in landscape form strives to reflect the foregoing thoughts.

I believe that our dualistically inclined nature overrides our inherent nature, and divides things into the beautiful, and the ugly and is based on human delusion, and that we must return to a state of non preoccupation and freedom from this impediment if we are to achieve a beautiful art. I believe that we suffer from too much reality.

“There is only one thing is art that is worthwhile; that which cannot be explained” - Braque