Richard Gold Paintings

March 2014

In 1997, I made a conscious decision to put my participation in public exhibits on indefinite hold. I was under considerable pressure from curators and gallery owners to produce work that wasn’t so “eccentric”—in other words, more easily definable and “saleable”, more in tune with current artistic trends. Realism and abstraction blended together, especially on an oddly shaped format, were definitely not going to fit the groove. Avant-garde viewers saw romantic realism and decided that my whole style was too old-fashioned. More conservative viewers felt that I was ruining my skilfully painted realistic images by abruptly spattering paint all over them. Both seemed to find the diagonal rectangle format too odd or gimmicky.

Although I understood their need to support or display works that weren’t perhaps so complicated, those for which there was an established understanding, I decided that being compliant was not going to allow me to pursue my own personal vision. Although money and potential recognition were compelling seductresses, I decided that, for better or for worse, I just could not abandon the path I had chosen for myself. I needed the satisfaction of following my own creative direction through to some sort of conclusion—regardless of how it all turned out.

Oddly enough, when I look at the art being displayed today, more than three and a half decades after my own visual style began to crystalize, my work would not seem so out of place in many contemporary exhibitions. The complicated formal problems that artists are grappling with today are surprisingly similar to those I began addressing so long ago. I am now finding that the pictures I was producing back then— those that only fellow artists seemed to appreciate at the time– are now coming of age. For me, the irony is delectable.