STATEMENT

After primarily painting the figure for many years, I began to incorporate trees in my figural work as symbols of nature in relation to humanity, and specifically nature under threat. Slowly my focus has narrowed and expanded simultaneously to more abstract work based on the structure of trees in an ongoing series I call TREESCAPES. Using lines and shapes based on small sections of tree-like structures as frameworks, I build abstract compositions with paint, oil stick, and sometimes collage in colors associated with different times of day or times of year.

In 2020 my wife and I moved from Raleigh to a house on a spacious wooded plot outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina adjacent to Nature Conservancy land. My work seems like a natural pursuit underneath the towering canopy of hardwoods that surrounds me. I am fascinated with the timeless aspect of that canopy, the seeming chaos of lines guided by a certain order, the natural thrust toward light while rooted firmly in the Earth, the morphic similarities with circulatory and nervous systems, lightning, the movement of water through the landscape, veining in rock, and the strength, the grace, and at the same time, the fragile balance in nature. All this reminds me daily of the need to protect and preserve the natural world around us, which in essence is a matter of the preservation of ourselves as parts of the whole.

As my work has become more abstract, I have begun to explore how I can compose paintings in similar ways to the TREESCAPES, but with political and social intentions other than humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

 

ABOUT RICHARD GARRISON

Having received training and gained experience in a variety of areas, including carpentry, computer operations, forestry, merchandise distribution, cabinet making, dry cleaning service, cooking, dishwashing, anthropology, and picture framing, Garrison focused on the visual arts in 1980. He attended North Carolina State University where he was able to take many courses at the School of Design, before transferring to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Visual Art. He received his BFA there in 1985 and attended a year of graduate school in Art Education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He taught high school Art for six years, while beginning to show, sell, and win numerous awards and one grant for his work.

Since becoming a full-time working artist in 1993, Mr. Garrison’s work has focused primarily on the figure and still-life. Though the work has taken many subtle shifts over the years, from realistic to more abstracted images, straight painting to mixed media explorations, or the conceptual to the spontaneous, he has always sought to honestly connect with the viewer through a depth of feeling and representation of universally shared experience. Since 2012 he has shifted from the figure to his Tree series, and most recently to his T R E E S C A P E S series in which he explores those natural forms, separate from any realistic landscape context. Garrison’s work has been exhibited throughout the Southeast, and can be found in many corporate, private, and public collections in the region and beyond. He lives with his wife Van in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and maintains a home studio.