Ruby Read

Ruby Read is a British oil painter working in portraiture, still life, and botanical subjects. Originally from Shrewsbury, she completed a First Class BA at Camberwell College of Arts and her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2025. She has since completed Tracey Emin's Victoria House Residency in Margate, and will undertake a further residency at Duplex in Lisbon later in 2026.

Her work is expressive, often uncanny, and always deeply personal. Self-portraits play with the performance of femininity, while her botanical paintings and still life compositions bring the same emotional intensity to the objects and plants she collects around her. Thick impasto, bold colour, and icing-like surfaces give her subjects an almost sculptural presence, influenced by Frank Auerbach, Emilio Villalba, Lucian Freud, and John Currin.

Her RCA degree show project, "All the Wicked Are Here," comprised 150 small oil portraits of every student on her MA course, highlighted by Blowout Magazine and London Art Roundup as a standout of the 2025 graduate show.

Her work is held in the Travers Smith Collection, the Rise Art Collection, and the Pilgrm Hotel Collection. Visually, her world draws from vintage postcards, retro beauty culture, and the dreamlike haze of classic film, nostalgic but warped, skewed, and slightly surreal.