His oil paintings are notable for their meticulous detail accumulated during months of plein-air sessions, depictions of industry and the environment, and elongated compositions with complex perspective.
[1] Born Rodney Harry Rackstraw Downes in Pembury, Kent, England, he moved to the United States and studied painting as an exchange student at The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut from 1957 to 1958.
[2] He then returned to England and attended Cambridge University, where he was at St John's College and received a Bachelor of Arts in English literature.
[3] Downes' friendship with Welliver led to the purchase of a farm in Maine in 1964, where he began drawing the landscape, thus changing direction from the non-representational manner of his student work.
[5] Downes' paintings are characterized by their vastness of scope as much as their attention to detail: "they are composed of a fused sequence of visual observations, their horizontal lines 'bending' so as to acknowledge the Earth's curvature and the limitations of two-point perspective when applied to wide-angle views.