Raphe Coombes latest work 'Life is Beautiful' Opens at Straight jacket Saturday 29th August, 11-5pm come meet the Artist

Coombes’ paintings balance lightness with underlying existential weight. Symbols emerge and dissolve, narratives begin but refuse to settle with meaning differed rendered through a playful naive lens, this tension gives rise to a body of work that’s deeply personal and Universally resonant.

Works operate as visual meditations rather than answers, echoing the instinctive ways children interpret the world, curious, fragmented and unburdened by certainty. Connecting the importance of fatherhood and healing oneself through the work, with a visual of clear abstraction with purpose, feeling in paint, a call from a higher self only reachable by surrender.