| Richard Vaux | ||
| Birth Date: 1940 |
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Artist Gallery |
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| Richard Vaux has had an increasingly impassioned relationship with art and its connection to the natural world. He was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania in 1940 and has a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from Miami University, Ohio, and a Masters of Fine Arts from Illinois University. In between degrees, Vaux established a studio in Hempstead, New York, taught at Adelphi University in New York, and served in the U.S. Army in Wurzburg, Germany. His first visit to Iceland in 1970 strongly inspired his work of the natural world. The natural aspects of Iceland, such as the dramatic weather changes, the early morning sunsets and sun rises three hours later, and the massive collections of wind-blown lava dust on glacier walls became a passion to Vaux and a profound influence on his work.
Vaux’s first exhibition was a group show at The Heckscher Museum of Art in 1964, shortly after his graduation from Miami University. He has exhibited at the 1964 World’s Fair at the New York State Pavilion, the George Hecht Gallery in Florida, Hafnarfjordur Institute of Culture and Fine Art in Iceland, Nippon International Nicaf in Tokyo, Japan, as well as several other galleries across the United States, Canada, Australia, South America, Europe and the Far East.
Although Vaux’s pieces are nature landscapes that look familiar to us, they come completely from his imagination. He begins each piece by throwing powdered carbon onto the paper, and then airbrushing it for highlights. After this process is complete to his satisfaction, he airbrushes watercolor on to add a splash of color. The entire process from start to finish takes hundreds of hours. Sometimes he adds geometric shapes to echo the geometry of the square frame. He has stated that he gravitates towards nature and geometry because he sees them as abstract subject matter that offer him the freedom to do what he chooses.
Richard’s love of carbon ignited in the mid-1990s, when he began searching for a medium that would truly and inherently lend itself to the creation of nature-inspired compositions. Around this same time, he was teaching a course in Media and Materials at Adelphi University. Researching the origins of pigments led him to the discovery that carbon is probably the most ancient of artist’s materials. Art History Professor Jacob Wisse wrote that “Carbon is the root of all living matter, the building blocks of life itself.” Because carbon is the basis of all life, Richard feels that it is the perfect medium for his work, while his airbrush emulates wind and weather to create poems of light and illumination.
The art of Richard Vaux has been described by historians as Formalist, Romantic, and Abstract Impressionist, but Vaux himself views his work as strictly Abstract Impressionist. The use of carbon to illustrate landscapes lets the viewer enter an almost ethereal world that uses tones and values to create works of art. The duality of his materials gives way to an inspiring luminosity that brings the atmospheric appearance and ambience of his compositions.
“My works reveal a timeless landscape. They are visual poems about light and illumination
...the visible and the invisible.” – Richard Vaux
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