NYAB Event - Bill Richards Exhibition

Bill Richards Exhibition

Nancy Hoffman Gallery

This event has ended.

An exhibition of graphite drawings by Bill Richards, encompassing five years of work, opens at Nancy Hoffman Gallery.

Richards speaks about his work:

“My drawings are an investigation of nature and landscape that also reflect a long-standing involvement with an abstract sense of all-over composition. I work exclusively with graphite, eschewing any color, bringing the viewer into a different, less familiar experience of the natural world. I apply the graphite in a way that the fiber of the paper and the graphite particles become intertwined to eliminate the appearance of any distinctive graphite marks, and the texture of the paper. I aim to produce a sense of pure form.

“I create precise, highly-realized shapes that present a close-up view of nature just a few feet from the viewer, in some ways more akin to the space of still life than of traditional landscape. The works may carry with them a sense of poetry or the unreality of dream or fantasy.

“I work with 2B to 10H graphite leads on four-ply cold pressed paper. I spend months working on each drawing, depending on its size, developing the images and working in small sections from left to right across the paper. While the process is meditative and demanding of patience and focus, I am immersed in depicting each element of the image while orchestrating movements of form and tone across the entire surface.

“I use photographic slides I take in nature as the basis for my work, often combining parts of several slides to create a drawing. I do not copy a slide. Instead, I look at my 35mm slides using a 18-power jeweler’s loupe and then draw from memory what I have just looked at, allowing the images to provoke new ideas and inventions. A great amount of imagery is developed through imagination. I make final alterations using a ‘bridge’ to keep my hand from ever touching the paper. Most of the slides that I use have been taken in a nature preserve in upstate New York.”

Never swaying from his voice, or responding to the tides of fashion, Richards’s drawings have a clarity, poetry and evocative nature of few contemporary drawings.