Roberta Richman

Featured currantly in Silent Presence : A Members Exhibition at Hera Gallery

https://www.heragallery.org/roberta-richman

Landscape inspires my work. Looking at horizons, fields, marshland, dunes and beginning new work with a particular place in mind is how I move from a white sheet of paper to the first of many stages of the original image. My affinity to natural landscape has not changed but over time my expression of it has.

All of the work, although it starts as a particular landscape, quickly becomes the vision of my imagination. I am never certain when I start a painting, what it will eventually become. I have been making art for many decades but with long interruptions. Now I am able to work more regularly, to come back to a painting and watch it gradually emerge. The end is usually a surprise to me. Although I carry the image of landscape in my mind, art and nature are not the same. I make no effort to replicate nature in art.

Roberta Richman lives and works in her studio in Peace Dale, Rhode Island. She has an MFA in printmaking from Indiana University, a BA in Fine Arts from Brooklyn College and worked for several years at the Pratt Graphic Art Center in NYC.

She is a founding member of Hera Gallery and has been an artist member, gallery administrator and Board member since its inception in 1974. After many years of interrupted work she is now back full time to her studio work. She curated and juried many invitational and special interest exhibitions for Hera during her 46 year membership in the gallery.

Richman began her training as an undergraduate at Brooklyn College where she studied with Ad Rhinehardt and Jimmy Ernst. She worked at the Pratt Graphic Art Center in Manhattan for several years before entering the MFA program in printmaking at Indiana University where she studied etching with Rudy Pozzatti. Her early work includes black and white etchings primarily of abstracted landscape. Since the mid 1980s she has gradually moved to painting as her primary medium, using oil sticks on paper glued to canvas. Throughout her career as an artist landscape has inspired her work. While her work is increasingly abstract the underlying elements of natural landscape are clear.