Gary Richman

Biography

Gary Richman holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Indiana University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brooklyn College. He taught printmaking and drawing at URI since 1967. Professor Richman has published over 20 limited editions under the imprimatur of Blue Book Issues. His artist’s books and NEFA exhibition catalogues can be found in corporate, university, public and private collections including the Tate Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Harvard University Library, Yale University Library, Smithsonian Institute, Walker Art Center Library, Clark Art Institute, Getty Research Library, University of South Australia, National College of Art and Design, Dublin.

Research

“Making art is an ongoing and sustained sequence of provisional conjectures. My image making exploits the collage process because it is the most efficient, unconstrained and unbiased means of aesthetic evaluation. Visual presentiments build on each other and extenuate. The result is more than the sum of its component intuitions.

In my paintings, form, color, pattern and autonomous markings create a surface of geometric harmonies and painterly dissonances. They have the requisite power of language. In my books, the power of images is subjected to the elusive validity of words. I seek a personal vernacular that avoids insular self-indulgence yet permits me to engage in the general discourse of contemporary art, a voice that is subtle yet insistent enough to maintain a tangential connection to the “real world”.

I want to bring a global range of visual elements from disparate cultures and diverse times together – without addressing hermeneutical peculiarities, without implying doctrinal associations and without evaluating traditional exegeses. Content is always construed, translated and often condemned to misapprehension. Like Santayana’s beauty in the eye of the beholder, it is sometimes coincidental but not entirely unintended.”