Ruby Read (b. 2002, Shrewsbury, UK) is a London-based painter whose work navigates the space between portraiture and observation, capturing the charged presence of people, objects, and everyday encounters. A graduate of the Royal College of Art (MA Painting, 2025) and Camberwell College of Arts (BA Fine Art Painting, First Class Honours, 2024), she approaches painting as an act of close attention—rendering faces, plants, and found objects with equal intensity. Her compositions resist hierarchy, instead drawing disparate elements into a shared, intimate field. Working with thick, tactile applications of paint, often layered directly from the tube, Ruby builds dense, expressive surfaces that foreground process and materiality. Influenced by painters such as Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, and John Currin, her work embraces both psychological depth and subtle, offbeat humour. Currently based in Margate as part of Tracey Emin’s Victoria House Residency, she continues to develop a practice rooted in immediacy, curiosity, and the vivid strangeness of the everyday.