Bob Richardson

“SOCIAL DISTANCING”

PAINTINGS DURING LOCKDOWN 

Since graduate school (in the middle of the last century) I have always been a “systemic” painter.  This means that I work from a system that I have developed to make a painting.  The system determines what I paint with, what color I use, where I put it, and how I apply it to the substrate (“process” is also part of the system).  In this way, my paintings became “ego-less”, devoid of pride, without any special personal, topical, or symbolic significance.  In recent years I was prone to using the paint from previous paintings saved in a “waste bucket” applied with a squeegee to a taped up canvas.  The results were interesting and always suggested to me what the next painting should be.

This process produced many colorful, textural, exciting pieces.  Then I began work on a five foot square canvas behind which I had placed a shaped piece of foam core board simply for support.  As I went about painting with my squeegee, a curved line appeared on the surface.  I decided to use this and continued to move the foam-core until the painting was finished…with a very clear circle in the very middle!  I called this “ENSO”.                                        

Several paintings ensued and eventually, so did the Pandemic.   Early times in the COVID “lock-down” found me spending isolation time at home in my studio.  There were lots of unknowns in my life (as in anyone’s) and I feared for us all, my family and myself, who had entered a category of people who were “compromised”… old!    As if growing old wasn’t enough (I am 83), these times brought loneliness, thoughts of death, isolation from friends and any social contact, and my paintings started to lose color, eventually becoming white (or actually “off-white”{ in some way).   A substantial collection of these “white” paintings is presented in this show,  each paired with a Haiku from hundreds of years ago that seemed to evoke similar feelings.

                                                                                                Bob Richardson