During his month-long residency, Richard Amend is focusing on Observational Sharpie drawings quickly executed in a Moleskin sketchbook no bigger than an envelope your bills come in, and then large-scale black pastel drawings, completed enough to finish later in the studio. Although abstraction is the main ingredient in my painting practice regarding systems and color, drawing remains the core of my foundation.
From the 2004 Carnegie Museum (Oxnard) exhibition “Between Abstraction & Revelation,” Jo Lauria writes in the catalog essay “Under a Liquid Sky,” Richard Amend is a painter who has a clear vision of beauty and a great feel for decorative design. Despite the prevailing arguments against the representation of beauty in late 20th century art discourse, Amend has chosen to produce paintings and drawings that reach for the sublime: they are quiet, graceful works full of lyricism and luminosity, deepened in sensation by an insightful application of design and pattern. Amend uses the format of landscape as a point of departure to render mysteriously radiant abstractions of nature, especially lush canopies of trees, foliage, illumined against the shimmering sky and nightscapes resplendent with ethereal light. The artist skillfully blends unabashed romantic realism with design devices to create a highly saturated, stylized approach to the plein air tradition. His concerns are to clarify nature through abstraction, by controlling the relationships of space, scale, detail, color and illusion.”