Strata, Various

Literature

New York City born Richard Hawk enjoyed a demanding career as a communications and advertising designer for fortune 500 companies and universities before moving to full time fine art in the early 2000’s. He has been awarded for his ground breaking paintings with numerous shows exhibiting on both coasts including his home studio base in San Diego, California. Prolific and international in focus, his highly celebrated works of oil on copper can be found in many collections around the world.

One art investment broker remarked that “Hawk has achieved something truly novel and his artwork will stand the test of time as being the first person to develop this technique, style and approach to a blank surface. There are followers and there are leaders, and Richard Hawk falls unquestionably into the latter.”

In the beginning, explorations into the use of copper as a substrate for paintings were experiments. Success upon success with his signature marriage of copper and paint led to devotion to the metal, now an intrinsic part of his work. The reason, says Hawk: a dynamic, active surface. “It glows with life,” he says, “and the painting morphs as light changes during the day. Just walking past it reveals new layers and voices each time.”

Hawk welcomes co-creation with the forces of nature into his artworks through oxidation (patina) processes; masterful brushwork in the tradition of oil painting launches the works into new territory.

Interwoven throughout his work are themes of humanity, nature and science. Hawk’s figurative works question the future with echoes of the past; heroines and heroes hinting at things to come or dreams remembered. In the meditative abstract pieces, geometric shapes confer order upon labyrinths of rich organic detail.

A Richard Hawk painting is a soul-soothing, brain-teasing homage to the artist’s alchemy of copper-as-canvas. “The infinite and the ephemeral coexist everywhere,” says the artist, “Here too in these paintings.”

Artist’s Notes:
Demarcations, delineations, boundaries, divisions, compartments, stratifications – are what this painting represents for the artist; along with the counterpoints, the elements that break through and defy or relieve the segmenting.

Alkyd oil pigments were dragged over the patinated sheet of copper with various large squeegees. Bravura brushwork and knifed on paint assert themselves in a take-no-prisoners style.
The chroma, or sheer intensity of color, is designed to inspire, with the red color note demanding attention.

Hawk likes playing off geometric forms, against painterly markings for tension and balance.