Rick Tomasi
Rick Tomasi is an Italian-Irish artist and printmaker based in Ely, Cambridgeshire, who has devoted himself full time to design and making since 2021. His work centres on numbers, geometry, ratio and proportion, and has been described as futurist, perhaps a legacy of studying engineering in the Italian Alps, a region with close links to that early twentieth-century movement.
Largely due to his training as an engineer, he approaches each piece as a problem to be solved. Once a theme is settled, the work begins in pencil on paper, with sketches developed, measured and balanced; colour palettes are then tested on a computer, with pens, or by overlaying tissue paper. Since late 2023 he has screen printed using photo emulsion, a process well suited to much of his work.
He was a Guest Artist with Artworks East, the professional group of contemporary East Anglian artists, in 2024 and became an elected member in 2025, which led him to join the Gainsborough's House Print Workshop in Sudbury. His screen print Red Chair was selected for the Royal Society of British Artists Annual Exhibition in 2025. In December 2025 he co-founded Inkpot Gallery in Ely, which shows his work alongside that of more than forty other printmakers and ceramicists. Next year, 2027, will see him try new printmaking methods, clock design and ceramics.
Artist Statement
I make prints and I inhabit the land between traditional printmaking and graphic design.
I will start with a topic – be it time, a sport, a line from a book, or a cultural reference – and a pencil and paper. It is then a question of how can I grasp the essence of the chosen topic in the simplest way possible. The sketching process can take time, but is the foundation on which the final piece rests. For me the most important thing is the overall balance of a piece: that lines balance each other, colours are in balance. There is only one question I ask myself when I have chosen a final sketch that will become the artwork, "Is it cool?". A helpful, simple question with a 'yes/no' answer that will decide if I go forward with the idea.
I would describe my work borrowing the words from gallerists and dealers who have seen it: simple and intentional.