Richard Stodart
A native of Trinidad and Tobago, the West Indies, Richard C. Stodart is a Canadian citizen and graduate of Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University). A self-taught artist, his paintings trace his personal wayfinding quest of self-affirmation.
Since 1973, when beginning his painting experience, Richard has conjoined his painting quest with a prodigious engagement of religious teachings and various healing and energy systems that reflect his explorations. He was awarded a Canada Council Grant in 1975 for his first series of paintings, in which a human figure deconstructs through presence to overcome juxtaposition to an open field in the name of unity. The experience of presence is central to his body of inwardly meditative or outwardly engaged figurative work.
In the 1990’s the figure is abstractly one and the same wayfaring terrain. In Free and Easy Wandering, this dynamic is expressed with a quiet but active voice through color, hue, and line. Richard speaks of this as the reflexivity of radical reason, in which figure and ground are simultaneously dual and nondual.
Activity and expression in the reflexivity of reason have been orientational foci in Richard's work since 2005: "I am indebted to Dogen's Zen perspective of nonthinking emptiness as the mediator of existence-time/Buddha-nature-impermanence, in which activity fathoms the Way to be one with expression, and expression has the path be attuned to activity. In this intra-dharmic reflexivity of self-fulfilling being-time, all beings and things are one and the same time: "Mountain mountains mountain, and sees mountain." Picture is reality, reality is picture."
Richard's paintings have been exhibited in galleries in Canada, Hawaii and the US mainland, and have been featured on magazine, book, and music album covers. He is the author of DreamMaking: The Intimacy of Picture/Reality, Free And Easy Wandering: Markings of the Way, and Richard Stodart: Retrospective.
He and his wife, Nancy, live in Virginia, USA.
Friends, 1987, acrylic on canvas, 36" x 47.5" (carnival inspired painting, right).
