Memory and Experience

Today after pulling out a barely started canvas from years ago, I saw that the photograph I used as a reference was missing. This is probably why it remained unfinished. I'd rather use a plein air sketch, painted on location, as a reference anyway.  A photo alone gives incomplete and often a flattened view. The camera doesn't see as the human eye does.  A plein air sketch gives me the colors that I personally see, the subtle nuances that will give life to the piece and is not cluttered with anything unnecessary.

I've painted or sketched the Hudson River at least a hundred times and have studied it nearly a thousand  times.  There is a remarkable view from my classroom window at the college where I teach art.  Today relying only

Photo from my classroom at SUNY Orange in Newburgh, NY where I teach one
day a week as an adjunct art professor. (This summer I'll be teaching online
so that I may be in Italy conducting a workshop as well. )

on my memory and experience I began working on this piece again with surprising ease.

                         Pastel, sold, painted from the college's open air garage during a storm.

Pastel or Oil Painting.. Which do you prefer?

Two paintings of the same place.
One is in pastel...
the other a rendition created in the studio in oil.

Which do you prefer?  Or both?

                                                Pastel Painting en plein air (on location)

Oil Painting created in the studio

 looking at the sky out of the window

and using the pastel study for reference.

These paintings are in my studio currently.

I expect them to be in the exhibit on Martha's Vineyard

at the Nikki Sedacca Gallery 

starting Friday May 22nd

10 am- 10pm. 

23 Winter Street

Edgartown, MA

508 - 627-5373

L. Richichi studio 

845 527-1146

Call to purchase

or to commission a work of art.

Small work

Detail from a pastel

Venice Bridge

5" x 7 "

Painting a study works for me
because then I have the colors
that photographs can't capture.

This painting 

will be in the exhibit at the

 Cultural Center at Ponte Vedra
Ponte Vedra, Florida

 Dec. 4rth to Dec. 26th.