Richard Vachon
/Richard Vachon
A lot of my earliest memories include a pencil in hand and dreams of being an artist. Primarily, the art I make combines line and color, but I am also fascinated with juxtaposition. My marks are loose and controlled. I contrast the detailed and the gestural along with improvisation and the premeditated. The sublime and the profane fight and often gel with one another. I strive to illicit any emotional response from the viewer. I seek and find inspiration from the entire history of creatives. Old masters, Expressionism, Surrealism, illustration, movies, animation, cartoons, comics, and mass-produced disposables are just a few. I am drawn to the beautiful and the absurd. Often, I create art that reflects the zeitgeist but feels timeless. I like to explore the earnest and the frivolous. I have a cartoonist’s anarchic spirit, so my art is often infused with humor. I try not to shy away from transgressive impulses and accidents are always welcome. I set boundaries for myself, then go wild within those self-imposed rules. I mainly work with traditional media such as pencil, ink, charcoal, and paint but want to include digital tools in my art. I hope a little piece of my id and personality are displayed in each of my works.
Fascinated with the malleability of clay, what better symbol of life animated from the lifeless as the golem? Distortion and humor, texture, shadow, and character were considered when creating these compositions. These eerie totems represent the grotesque and playful, malformed creatures ripped from the earth and cast into a nightmarish limbo of perpetual torturous ecstasy.
