Richard Patterson

Richard Patterson – Nature Paintings

Cris Worley is pleased to present the 9th to 17th Nature Paintings by Richard Patterson (b.1963).

Each painting is in a landscape format and is its own discrete panel on raw cotton duck canvas.

The paintings all have a lateral movement of paint, suggesting travel, speed and time like the view of the landscape from a moving train, which are all made using a single, but repeated passes with a large palette knife and utilizing the same eight colors, applied in different sequences, the canvas being turned back and forth. Each stroke of the knife is executed very slowly and as paint builds up in layers, the blade both adds and dredges colors from beneath until a type of 'nature' takes hold and the process itself either creates harmony, a sense of light, or suggests a subject.

Each painting has its own creative envelope of inception. If the painting doesn't reveal itself after several hours, the compressed paint eventually turns to a greyish mud and dies.

The single-stroke-nature of the paintings, is a series of hits back and forth - not unlike tennis - until something triumphs over nothing.

Each painting is prefixed with the word Nature, with its own unique suffix, e.g. Nature, Bronze. Subtitles of each painting suggest an ironic relationship to the use of the word "nature" since they imply references to other artists (Hockney, Munch, Richter) as well as events (the artist's own year and place of birth), or romantic titles such as Silverlake, Mars, or statements such as "Like a Viking" and "We shall fight them on the beaches".

The titles emerge quickly. Oftentimes, the final pass with the knife (each pass takes 30-60 seconds and is made like bowing a cello very slowly and with a degree of muscular control and nuanced pressure indicates closure as it happens in real time. At this point a title appears almost immediately.

The process is almost identical to a poetic conceit or line in poetry. The colors and striations, partly accidental, but partly the result of a cumulative series of intuitive decisions can be neither controlled nor left to chance.

The result is a pictorial emotion. A single stroke which compresses the striations of paint into a single paint film or emulsion which creates its own unique fact, its own nature.

The inspiration for the paintings is both political and cultural. A background influence is the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams and the paintings of William Nicholson, while the recent political temperament to defy nature instilled in the artist the desire to assert that this cannot be so; that there is fact and there is fiction. That culture may seem the opposite of nature and that all things may be possible, but that in the end, nature reclaims us. At the start of each pass of the knife is the buildup of paint as unwieldy inert material -unmitigated artifice and culture - pigmented dirt suspended in oil, but the paint will only travel so far on the canvas according to its hydraulics and viscosity as it comes in contact with the canvas and the residual paint. The paint, no matter how loaded the knife, will lose its load two thirds of the way across the small canvas at the same point with every sweep. As the paint gets to the other side, it has given way to nature and physics, it has begun to fade and lose its definition and delible register and succumbs to its own limits. It is, in other words, like a repeated life cycle.

---Richard Patterson

For more exhibitions with Richard Patterson please click below:

https://www.crisworley.com/exhibitions/richard-patterson

Nature Paintings

March 1 – April 12, 2025

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