Art, Nature & Soul #11

Melancholia & Bliss, are the dual nature of emotion and being. We cannot as humans have one without the other. To have great sadness in our lives is to have had great joys,  to express some of those deep emotions are something I strive to convey in my work. 

I've been drip, splash & splattering for as long as I can remember. It is not merely an aesthetic or decorative expression for me, though, but more so, an emotive one. The drips of paint, a symbol of blood, of sweat, of tears, like a rainy day, in color, the duality of loss & gain, the persistence of memory, how we see it or what we make of it.

Most of my artworks of this nature and approach have been of a more abstract nature, although over the years I have begun to fuse the representational aspects of my surroundings and life into the process and images. This piece was created just after what seemed an epoch of my life, a turning point. Who I was, how I saw myself and defined myself had once again undergone some dramatic and severe changes. 

We were on vacation, along the Atlantic seaboard, it was the first one in a very long time. I mixed the abstract, the representatinal, the drips, splatters and splashes together, layered on canvas to convey my deep feelings of loss & isolation, of hope & love. Memories fade, but are conveyed and sounds, smells, & visuals are strong triggers to bring us back and humble us our being.

Enjoy, and feel free to comment or contact me for more information.  

'Silhouette on the Beach', 20x10, Acrylic on Canvas

Art, Nature & Soul #6

From my earliest memories of drawing, my primary interests were of people. There are even ones in crayon, around my studio, that were done when I was 6 or 7 years of age. Throughout my childhood you could find me doing drawings of the people around me, mostly cartoon or caricature in style. Sometime in middle school my interests in Leonardo Da Vinci and a more realistic approach took hold as did my medium of choice being pencil. Later in high school, pen & ink cartoons, of all my classmates and teachers, then followed by some commissioned portrait works in soft pastel. While I found realism a struggle and favored the more stylized or caricature works, I had it my head to become a portrait painter and studied that for a time. In my 20s, I really wanted to study with a local rococo style portrait artist, but did not happen, then later took a Rembrandt style portrait class at the SAIC. Life is demanding, our priorities are often dictated to us, as such my openness to to impressionism, post impressionism and expressionism opened up a wide berth of creative outlets and opportunities for artistic growth.  I explored these arenas of art and found them more conducive to the particulars of my life. Over the past decade or so my primary subjects tend to be more landscape and abstract, either building up those basic design essentials or breaking them down into their essence. However, I still love people, doing realistic figurative work and sometimes I have the opportunity to do such. This was the case in this piece and became a merging of learning, mediums, subjects and ideas. Feel free to comment or ask questions. 

Thank you for your support. ~ Richard

'Dream Sequence #50' 24"x20" mixed media on canvas