At his studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Willy Bo Richardson is in his element. Stretching bright swathes of paint across broad canvas, Willy builds his mesmeric abstractions through graceful gestures and bold, harmonized colors.
Before moving to Santa Fe, Willy lived and worked in New York City for a decade, where he immersed himself in the international art scene, earning his M.F.A. in painting from Pratt Institute in 2000. His work has been exhibited alongside renowned modern and contemporary painters, including Josef Albers, Hans Hofmann and Jackson Pollock, and is collected around the world.
TurningArt joined Willy in his studio to learn more about his work and practice, and to listen to his experiences as an artist.
“We had a good laugh,” he says, “but it’s good once in a while to question motivations and methods.” He’s quick to point out, however, “They’re not stripes!”
Richardson’s vertical strokes of bold, vibrant colors are a study in the twin forces of gravity and his own creativity. His colors, in both watercolor and oil paints, vibrate against one another, pulling viewers into a rainbow of movement. Brushstrokes are large and loose, or narrow and tight. Colors edge playfully over one another. A dense, bright red breaks up a field of calming blues. Each painting can stimulate or soothe, and sometimes both. “Vertical strokes are not a random choice,” he says. “Gravity makes all objects fall to the center of the earth, and that shapes my work.”
Painting, inextricable from human and social evolution, continues as a ready target for provocateurs lobbing the contention that the medium’s expressive force of action has finally achieved irrelevance to hands-free digital imaging. The conversation generated within “That’s Where You Need to Be,” a curated exhibition at Albuquerque’s Richard Levy Gallery, refutes such critical claims and even co-opts them with a demonstration of how the act of painting remains married to elemental expressive instincts. Continue reading “Adobe Airstream – Painters Point the Way at Richard Levy Gallery”
“Uncovering Santa Fe’s Vibrant Visual Arts”. Santa Fe visual arts Video shot by Bill Stengel, featuring artists based in Santa Fe, New Mexico – Willy Bo Richardson, Cara Romero and others.
“The City Different”
Santa Fe, New Mexico is a city unlike any other. The legendary history and culture continue today. Santa Fe has an art scene that spans from traditional to contemporary, award-winning cuisine, a world renowned opera house, museum level bi-biennials at SITE Santa Fe, and countless experiences to encounter.
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.
“That’s Where You Need to Be 2”, 2012 watercolor and gouache on paper, 26×42 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 exhibition at Phillips Auction house “Watercolors” 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?
Painting, Doritos and Color Theory by Katy Crocker
Over two decades 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.”
“Galleries are scrambling toward nationally relevant contemporary art,” says Willy Bo Richardson, a Santa Fe-born painter whose internationally acclaimed canvases of fluid vertical strokes hang at Canyon Road’s Turner Carroll Gallery. “The quaint notion of going to Santa Fe to buy howling coyote art is thankfully disappearing.”
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