DestinAsian Santa Fe

Apr 272013

I am delighted to be featured in the February/March 2013 issue of DestinAsian. DestinAsian is an award-winning travel magazine in the Asia-Pacific region. Article by Aaron Gulley, Photography by Jen Judge.

You can expand and flip through the flash version below:

I’ve also attached a PDF of the article “The Soul of Santa Fe”: DestinAsian Santa Fe Article.PDF

Excerpt from the article:

Notwithstanding food and architecture— and even writing— there’s an undeniable romance and import to painting, which is why I take a friend’s advice and contact Willy Bo Richardson, a rising star in contemporary art. “Come over to the studio and we can talk,” he replies when I e-mail him. Unlike New York, in Santa Fe there is a generosity of space and time.

Richardson, 38, lives in a diminutive adobe with his wife, Kim, and five-year-old-daughter, Audrey, and he paints in a bright, cramped attached garage that he’s converted to a studio. Though he’s shown in galleries from New York to London and sells paintings for more than most people spend on a car, Richardson is boyish, friendly, demure. His biography is startlingly similar to Emily henry’s: his parents moved to New Mexico in the ’60s and raised him on a commune; he moved to the East Coast to make his name (New York in this case), but returned to Santa Fe because he simply couldn’t stay away.

“People come here for the light and the space. It’s a good place to work out ideas and to think,” he says when we meet. He tells me that he couldn’t produce the works he does if he didn’t live in New Mexico. “Coming from New York, you fill yourself up with information. This is a good place to actually look at that information and let it settle in.”

It’s a side of Santa Fe that I take for granted. Cocoa brown hills stippled by dark green piñon trees loom east of town, while to the west scraggly empty desert rolls off as far as you can see. The landscape is sublime, but it’s the emptiness that’s truly affecting. The forever blue emerald sky is so wide and open that sometimes it feels like it could swallow you. On nights that I write into the silent hours, when I’m at a loss for words, just walking out into the desert and sitting a while beneath the stars can free up my mind and help me find my voice. It seems like a small thing but I realize now how powerful this place can be. Richardson adds, “You can’t live here without grappling with this incredible, vast expanse.”

Richardson paints wall-size canvases in fluid, vertical strokes of bold color. He shows me an orange and blue diptych, and you can feel Santa Fe’s spaciousness in the movement of the paint as well as the town’s struggling influences and incongruities in the contrasting tones. The painting, one in a series called “Music to drive To”, is nothing like Vigil’s exodus. And yet the two live side-by-side and somehow manage to blend under the wide umbrella of Santa Fe art.

Lately, Richardson tells me, in addition to painting he’s been teaching at Santa Fe University of Art and Design. “I have a student, a 60-year-old Hopi man,” Richardson says. The idea of a young, Anglo, contemporary painter instructing an older Native American in abstract art strikes me as a juxtaposition fit for Santa Fe. Richardson continues, “At one point he was making his art, and his gallery stopped him and said, ‘No, we like the buffalos and the eagles.’ He could sell a painting for US $400 because it has a buffalo on it, but I say screw that. I told him to learn the real story and sell it for a couple thousand.”

A thousand years after people first inhabited the town site, four hundred years after it was founded, and one hundred years after the decision was made to market its cultural heritage, Santa Fe continues to evolve and continues to grapple with what’s true. It’s impossible to say for sure, though I feel a little more certain when I wake at dawn a few mornings after visiting Richardson. As the black horizon line of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east sharpens with the approaching sun, ribbons of cloud glow pumpkin and coral and tangerine against strips of indigo and periwinkle sky— just like Richardson’s canvas. The color and intensity is something I’d have sworn couldn’t exist in nature, and yet here it is. And my first instinct, the only thing I can think about doing, is to sit down and write.

Aaron Gulley

WATERCOLORS Phillips de Pury, New York – galleryIntell

Oct 112012

WILLY BO RICHARDSON – WATERCOLORS
Phillips de Pury, New York

October 4, 2012
by Kristina Nazarevskaia

Willy and I met many years ago when a budding young painter, I ventured deep out into Brooklyn to buy stretcher bars from his studio. It was a random ad on Craiglist that brought me to a ground floor garage space on Myrtle Ave and into the very first real artist studio.

phillips de pury, watercolors, that's where you need to be

“That’s Where You Need to Be 2″, 2012
watercolor and gouache on paper, 26 x42 in

I remember feeling instantly awed by the perfect fluidity of color streaming down the canvas in soft vertical bands. Orange flowed next to the most brilliant turquoise, next to a deep alizarin crimson, next to a Naples yellow and all these colors seemed to be destined to exist in this very harmony, in this very space. There is a saying in Russian “Все гениальное – просто”, which roughly translates to all the ingenious things are in reality quite simple and this is how Willy’s work felt to me. It was perfectly simple, yet impossible for anyone but him to have conceived and expressed. Over the years we have kept in touch and finally met up again in New York in anticipation of the “Watercolors” exhibition at Phillips de Pury in Chelsea where several of Willy’s new works are installed in their very own room. I’ve asked Willy to talk about about his process and the paintings in this exhibition as I believe that in abstract art, understanding the artist’s physical process, his thought process and inspiration is an integral part of understanding the painting itself. What is it about the outside world or the inside space that brings out this line or this stain, or this field of color? How do thoughts and intentions come to life?

Here is how Willy described his process:

… click here to read full article here …galleryIntell Willy Bo Richardson – Watercolors – Phillips de Pury

Abstraction: Informers and The Informed By Peggy Roalf

Jun 282011

Abstraction: Informers and The Informed

By Peggy Roalf Thursday April 21, 2011

The first known abstract painting was made in 1911 by Wassily Kandinsky, and so this 100^th anniversary year offers opportunities to explore a fascinating world of art from many points of view. Undoubtedly nudged by the multi-dimensional exploration of Abstract Expressionism currently on view at MoMA, numerous exhibitions continue to unfold in New York, including 70 Years of Abstract Painting—Excerpts at Jason McCoy Gallery.

The show starts off with a retina-blasting canvas from 1969 by Gene Davis (1920-1985) that capitalizes on ideas from Op Art practices of the day - filtered through an evidently fun-loving eye (below, left). At roughly 5.5 x 5.5 feet, the painting riffs on Josef Albers’ (1888-1976) Interaction of Color series, but done in a spectrum of vibrating stripes, rather than squares.

Installation views of 70 Years of Abstract Painting—Excerpts at Jason McCoy Gallery, courtesy the gallery

Just around the corner, the logic behind the selections, by Stephanie B. Simmons, becomes apparent. Masters of abstraction, from Jackson Pollack to Al Held, from Hans Hoffman to Richard Anuskiewicz, are placed alongside less well-known but influential artists, including Vaclav Vytacil, Norman Bluhm and Paul Kelpe. And in between, the current generation of non-narrative painters hold sway, with works by Peggy Bates, Sarah Mattes, Rob Nadeau, and many more.

The show is installed to capitalize on visual dialogues between groupings of works whose themes are often dominated by color, form and texture. An early Jackson Pollack, from the 1946 Aaccabonac Creek series, is formed with colors and bold strokes that suggest a riparian zone. Flanked by Sharon Horvath’s succinctly elliptical Blue One, 2009 and the mandala-like Untitled (Sonancy), 2009 by Gwenn Thomas, color and graphic forms in the grouping conspire to bridge both generation and gender gaps.

On the opposite wall is Homage to the Square: Grisaille & Ground, 1961, by Josef Albers The solid square shapes and earthy tones make a formal statement that is played off of, in a contrapuntal way, by the pyramidical shapes and shimmering zinc-like tones of Further I, 1984 by Hedda Sterne (1910-2011).

In the back gallery, color takes charge as the guiding principle, starting with a round canvas by Kenneth Nolan (1924-2010), whose red and blue bull’s eye sets the pace for the Op Art attributes of vibrating red and green forms in Correspondence Red-Green, 1967 by Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996); and for the circular cut-outs in Joe Fyte’s, Two Clouds, 2011, which are set off by a super-saturated blue field of gauze fabric.

Another wall has Paul Kelpe (1902-1985) as its “godfather,” represented by a small, almost square, architectonic oil painting from around 1925. Radiating out on either side are a dozen recent paintings whose main concerns are surface quality (above right). The heavy impasto of In Natura, 2010 by John Zinsser seems to be informed by Philip Guston’s non-figurative paintings from the 60s (one of which is currently on view at McKee Gallery). In Untitled, 2010 by Nick Lamia, transparent washes in blue and green oils are built up over extremely rough canvas, creating the illusion of a flat, glistening plane. And Three Muses, 2011 by Willy Bo Richardson, with its rough-textured stripes in high-key color, acts as a gleeful bookend for the opening wall of the show.

70 Years of Abstract Painting—Excerpts continues at Jason McCoy Gallery through May 20^th. The Fuller Building, 21 East 57^th Street, 11^th Floor, New York, NY.

original article found here: Abstraction: Informers and The Informed

70 Years of Abstract Painting, Jason McCoy Gallery: Katy Crocker Interview

Jun 102011

Jason McCoy Gallery, 70 years of abstract painting

Three Muses, 2011, Oil on Linen

Consider this statement: the painter is inextricably bound to paint. Although seemingly unarresting, this statement signifies the importance of medium. Imagine the possibilities of paint—the medium’s peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. Paint is mercurial. Color becomes paramount, along with application. In accordance with the range of human experience, paint expresses every possibility. Fittingly, painters who understood paint as expression of something nonrepresentational were dubbed abstract expressionists, including historical icons such as: Hans Hofmann and Josef Albers.

Contemporary artists, like Willy Bo Richardson examine and enrich the abex conversation. Consequently, Richardson’s painting Three Muses will be featured alongside several artists, including Hofmann and Albers, for “70 Years of Abstract Painting – Excerpt” at Jason McCoy Gallery in New York. The exhibition provides a platform for the examination of abstract painting throughout several decades.

In order to better understand Richardson’s process, I have asked the artist a few questions about his upcoming exhibition and work.

Read full article here: Willy Bo Richardson features work in upcoming “70 Years of Abstract Painting,” NYC

The End of Being: Painting, Doritos and Color Theory By Katy Crocker

May 112011

The End of Being: Painting, Doritos and Color Theory – The Work of Willy Bo Richardson

April 2011, by Katy Crocker

Sixteen years ago Santa Fe artist Willy Bo Richardson drove down highway 71 in Austin. As a painter consumed with his practice, he considered color. The blacktop road burst with light intermittently, revealing the yellow stripes on the street in the night. Time passed and Willy realized he was going the wrong way in relation to his destination. In the midst of this experience, he stopped at a gas station to reorient. As if by magnetism, he was pulled towards a bag of Doritos. The red and blue bag of Doritos served as a source of discovery, with a yellow chip inside.

This experience led him to the concept that red and blue make yellow. Forget logic, this was a philosophical exercise. Time passed, and yet another “ah-ha moment” showed the artist, via the visible light spectrum, that in fact yellow lies between red and blue, which became a theoretical platform for the artist and reconciled the “Doritos-moment.”

Discovering where a color like yellow comes from, and its relation to other colors would inform the artist’s paintings into the future.

Confluence 2006, oil on canvas
.

Regarding Willy’s art is deceptively pleasurable—something like the silence before a crescendo. Formal elements reduce to their essences, and color dominates each composition. “Confluence” suggests concepts that exist beyond its completeness, as if the paint strokes should take life and grow beyond the canvas.

Vertical lines, which serve as formal strictures for Willy’s work, allow color to excel. The lines are the control group, and the color is then free to variably play. I liken verticality to the depth of human experience, whereas horizontal lines indicate the passage of time.

I would be delighted to find everyday objects, upon dissection, revealed compositions like “Three Stages Number One,” or “Walkyries Number Three.” Willy’s paintings look through life experiences to an internal truth—similar to the position of yellow within the color spectrum, or the space that exists between the tiniest particles making up our material world.

“Three Muses, 2011” (at top) will be featured in “70 Years of Abstract Painting – Excerpt,” exhibiting at Jason McCoy Gallery in New York, April 6 – May 20, 2011. Other artists in the exhibition include: Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, and Josef Albers.

Hermes 2010, oil on canvas

View Original Article Here: The End Of Being: PAINTING, DORITOS and COLOR THEORY – The Work of Willy Bo Richardson

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