November 9 through December 28, 2019
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 9, 7-10 pm
For half a dozen years, artist Erynn Richardson has been best known for her somber explorations of the boundary between people and nature and the lethal interaction it can represent. Often, in her work, she has “reanimated” the creatures slain by hunters in the field (her own father was an avid huntsman). She has even taken on icons like the great Greek mythic hunter Orion, and put him in the context of all the world’s animals that he sought to slay before Nature herself cut him down. In her delicate watercolors and washes and applied gold leaf, she resurrected the sportsman’s bag of dead animals from a mute cultural icon into a glowing half life, defining the boundary between the living and the dead, and sometimes lovingly glorified by geometrical icon-like halos and baldacchinos.
Richardson once said: “The beauty of the once-living creature overwhelms me, and I find the object strangely alluring.” She added: “It is a strong tradition with roots that go back to the cave.”
But now, in her new solo show A Forest Enchanted at Bermudez Projects | NELA/Cypress Park, her artistic viewpoint has changed radically. Instead of dead game animals, living creatures – foxes and owls, badgers and weasel, chipmunks, mice, and even a tarantula – inhabit her new work.
Returning with a dozen ink and watercolor paintings – brilliantly anointed with gold leaf – Richardson gently guides us through her fantastical woodland idyll, reminding us of flora and fauna’s majestic grace.
“I feel it is a lot like I am conjuring up a Noah’s Ark,” Richardson notes. “I used to restrain myself. This time, I let myself go all out for beauty in my pictures.”
Along with more of life itself.
“There is less post-mortem,” she adds.
And, it would seem, more joy taken in vital nature’s living aspects.
Richardson’s vision is also growing larger. Sometimes literally. The largest picture in this new show presents “a choir of river otters” simply having a good time… invoking the water.” Elsewhere, she particularly is drawn to nocturnal creatures such as bats and owls, denizens who thrive in the dark.
She allows that she may be newly drawn to representing living wildlife since she and her husband moved to Riverside from their long-term residence near Long Beach State University (where she earned her MFA degree). “Our home there backed up against the University’s botanical garden,” she fondly recalls. She therefore lived with exactly the kind of natural abutment of human habitation and natural wilderness that so much of her work evokes. She says that the university garden, particularly at night, was a natural paradise, full of wild life that she was often able to observe, study and portray.
Now that she lives in Inland Empire suburbia, she says, “I really miss the wildlife” of her Long Beach urban sanctuary. “I even got to know the owls a little.” Fond memories of sharing nature in her old home have probably affected her recent work.
“My work is getting more hopeful,” she says now. Perhaps, she speculates, “life can be preserved, the wilderness can still remain wild.” She is fond of the idea of an enchanted forest, a perpetually safe place for creatures of the wild.
Concluding with a sense of optimism, Richardson says, “It is up to us to be the good stewards of nature, somehow to protect it from the rest of us.”
Erynn Richardson (b. 1985) attended California State University, Northridge earning her BA (2007) and MA (2009) before attending California State University, Long Beach where she earned her MFA in 2013. Along with her active studio practice, she teaches art, and is also an accomplished aerialist who teaches circus arts/aerial dance (she performed in an aerial troupe prior to attending graduate school). Her works have been exhibited in group and solo shows at galleries and museums, including the Irvine Arts Center and the University Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach. Richardson currently lives and works in Riverside, California.
