Art, Nature & Soul #93

I’ve been painting these Mini-Me’s, for almost a decade, most are in a 12”x12” gesso board format. I have a drying rack/wood box that holds about 20 that makes traveling with them easy. The immediacy and directness make them about as honest as it gets, there’s simply no time to over think them, which for me makes them especially attractive to paint. I allow myself a special grace & fearlessness, playing with color, texture and composition on them.

From top, left to right, my inspirations were in translating the vibe into paint in my own expressive way. Some were painted on location, others from a photo. The first is a farm set off in the distance in Illinois, #2, is Ptown, front and center, from the Atlantic ocean, with the Pilgrim monument towering over the scene, when we’re visiting we stay very near it, #3 can be any road but this is what it looked like as we entered Colorado, #4 the park across the street from my home at sunset, a film we watched provided inspiration for #5, #6 is mid fall at the park I walk daily with the pups, #7 was painted at Nambe Falls, NM, #8 after seeing Echo and the Bunnymen perform at the Riviera in downtown Chicago, I snap a quick photo which provided an interesting take on a nocturne and ambient light, #9 was painted at Escalante Trail, at Cerllios State Park in Santa Fe NM. Like I say, whatever I’m doing and thinking about is what I paint. My artworks are a chronology of my life happenings.

These pieces provide me with a way to experiment with color, texture, composition and all the design elements utilized in my larger artworks. They’re represent, in part, my continuing education. They can be framed or set on an easel as is and they make wonderful gifts. Several people have acquired 3 or 4 at a time to create groupings, 2 have done a 4 seasons composition with them. I know where I’ve painted each of them and what my inspiration was, but I love when someone says one, it triggers a memory of one of their happy places and they make it their own.

I hope you have enjoyed this brief insight to my world & artwork. As always your questions & thoughts are welcome.

Richard

Mini Me’s 2024

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