PR: Insightful Painter Looks Deep within Herself, Will Exhibit at Shirley Gallery March 4

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 26, 2022
Contact: Tamar Russell Brown, Sitka Creations — 978.425.6290

Insightful Painter Looks Deep within Herself, Will Exhibit at Shirley Gallery Friday, March 4 

Some visual artists look at the world and simply record what they see. They hold the mirror up to Nature and use their artistic skills to create an accurate rendering of the world around them. Other artists go one step further and interpret what they see. They reflect on their own strongly held opinions and judgments about the world, and then build that personal view into their paintings, drawings and sculptures. Finally there come artists who turn the mirror on themselves. All their artworks tend to be, in a very real sense, self-portraits. They seek not merely to understand the world, but to understand themselves. Melissa Richard seems to be one of these artistic soul-searchers.

“In Peace” is Ms. Richard’s exhibition of works completed from about the summer of 2020 to the end of 2021. The general theme of the show is the yearning for peace — perhaps most especially peace of mind. The subject matter is rendered in bold, abstract-expressionist style, but their inspiration derives from wrenching events of the artist’s own life, beginning in late 2019. She explains that, by early 2020, she found herself “fresh out of the hospital from a severe depressive episode” that forced her to face up to some very daunting and difficult issues. Melissa managed to turn these troubles into an artistic opportunity.

The works in the show fall into three different groups, or series. First comes “In Search of Peace,” which includes twelve canvases, each 16″ × 20″. The title of this series is appropriate indeed. Melissa sees these twelve paintings “as a means for me to work through a lot of what was going on internally for me…through that difficult time.”

Next is “Garden of the Mind,” which Ms. Richard reports “started as one large work in 2020,” before she “made the decision to cut up the piece and rework it.” Again ever in search of what is going on inside of her, the artist made use of pages of a journal she was keeping while she was hospitalized in 2019. At that time, she “had no words,” so she created collage images in the journal. “I really wanted to use the pages without destroying the journal itself,” she says. She solved this dilemma by making photocopies of some of the pages and then applying a technique called “acrylic transfer.” This is a print-making process whereby the exact image of the collage that she created in the journal took on the acrylic paint, which adhered to a new surface of very heavy paper. She explains that this process allowed her to give the pages “a whole new life and a totally different aesthetic than the originals.” By such methods does this intensely introspective artist translate her inner life into striking and beautiful pictures.

The last series includes only one painting, a large (24″ × 30″) canvas entitled “Tranquility.” It came to her first “as a kind of abstracted self-portrait, and I wanted flowers to be growing out of my head.” This surprising (and rather optimistic) image gives the artist a good deal of satisfaction. “This painting feels like the pinnacle of the show — me, finally reaching some level of tranquility.”

The show opens on Friday, March 4, at 4:30 p.m., at The Phoenix Park, 2 Shaker Road, Suite D101, in Shirley, Mass. Art lovers may want to visit https://gallerysitka.com/product-tag/melissa-a-richard for more information about Ms. Richard’s artwork.

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The show opens on Friday, March 4, at 4:30 p.m. at 2 Shaker Rd., D101, Shirley, MA 01464 from 4:30-6:30 pm. The show is open to the public. Masks are suggested.

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