I am a collision of thoughts, a collection of philosophies and conversations. I tend to internalize and contemplate my daily experiences for long periods of time. This leads to a web of associations in my mind; some clear, some convoluted. The results (if they can be called results, for in fact they are just another link in the chain of rumination) manifest themselves as the images on this site. A broad array of social concerns, philosophical quests, and musical and artistic preferences are distilled into images that are concerned with form, color, and line. On the surface, they are abstract, yet laced with narrative content. Whether this level of meaning is obvious to the viewer or not is a secondary concern to me during the process of image generation, so don't be discouraged if there is no immediately obvious thread with which to connect these individual works.
My artwork can be roughly divided into three areas: In the first, my social and environmental concerns are apparent on the surface. My main themes in these images deal with abandoned places of healing. I draw inspiration from photographic pilgrimages to such places as the Traverse City State Hospital in Michigan, and the Garden State Cancer Center in New Jersey. The hollow windows, crumbling brick and vine-choked passageways become metaphoric for the human condition. That is to say, even though these paintings seem to be of buildings, they are in fact portraits. My second area of investigation is into pure formal abstraction, although I approach it with a carefree illustrators background. Vivid colors and suggestive shapes populate this landscape, which veers from platonic formalism to sensuous spirituality. Thirdly, I am profoundly influenced by twentieth century graphic design: message-making, text-as-image, and propagandist imagery. The inherent potential of non-verbal communication, so successfully advanced by centuries of music, is locked within the simple graphic elements that we have defined as language, whether they be shape, text, color, or some deliberate confusion of all three. My approach is intuitive, with meaning and content, as demanded by the viewer or the critic, being derived through contemplation, often after the fact. In this regard, I am an engineer of raw data, rather than a storyteller. If you see yourself in my images, then I have succeeded. |
©peter richards |