Richard Hawk is an internationally collected artist living and working in San Diego, California. A figurative painter on canvas and paper, he also works in special oxidation techniques on copper.

Hawk looks for the truth beneath the surface of his subjects. His figurative paintings plumb the inner life – the minds, hearts and souls - of those who people his paintings.

We look to make sense of things, how we fit in life, love, and time, and answers lie within, he says.

The people in Hawk paintings often have a compelling air of reality. The worlds in which they dwell on the canvas, however, are another matter – these are realms of symbolic exploration.

Figures are wrapped in colors and forms that hint at clothing, hair, adornments, or objects, but these elements often are abstract or have a dreamlike quality. They seem to say that everything around us, our dress, the places we choose to be, the objects we surround ourselves with, spring out of our own ideas about what we are and what we should be.

Expressing the beauty, power and mystery of the human figure is a lifelong pursuit for Hawk. “I’ve come to the conclusion that the communicating power of the painted image has no equal,” he says.

Travels in China in 1999 stimulated his art career towards intense study of traditional forms of Asian brush painting. This led to development as a recognized watercolor painter in southern California, and eventually to his focus on figurative painting. Now painting his favorite subjects, people, mostly in oil, his goal is to produce pleasing paintings that also carry some lasting appeal.

This artist paints mostly women. Female energy is more expressive, he says. Women present dualities and opposites - vulnerability and power, mystery and fun, the sanctity of motherhood and the energy of sexuality, birth and the fleeting nature of life.

He references the transient nature of physical beauty. “Beauty always carries with it a touch of sadness, because we know it does not stay the same. Yet we know it will always be, it will come again in some other form.” People want to celebrate life, and beauty, and often don’t know how to do it. These paintings give voice to a joy and appreciation of what it is to be alive.

Working with models in the studio, Hawk draws from life and shoots hundreds of reference photos. Poring over this work in the following weeks is a creative exercise in itself. “What’s important, what I’m trying to say, begins to take shape.” Making selections from the visual ideas at hand, often combining aspects of different poses, plans for paintings emerge. Sometimes, the plan is followed easily to the conclusion of a successful painting. Often though, he says the painting ‘takes over’ and goes in a different direction from the original intent. “I’ve found out the hard way,” he says wryly, “that when the painting talks to me, she’s always right.”

Our lives are most profound when we are connected with each other, he says. When we look at a painting, we connect. We see beyond the usual, expressed in ways that go beyond words. “As human beings, we strive to connect because seeing and knowing another is like coming home, or coming into ourselves.” An uncanny ability to capture a sense of interior dialogue and emotion in richly painted surfaces helps him to this end.

The world is teeming with people, millions of lives, each unique, each majestic. And yet so many lives go quietly by. Beauty goes unnoticed, uniqueness is unheralded, acts of kindness unmentioned, struggles unspoken, pain ignored. These things must be expressed. They are what connects us. The expression and acknowledgment of these things helps us to understand, and to give and receive love.

A painting is a bridge that connects every viewer to every other person who ever gazed upon it. Wandering into and through a Richard Hawk painting is pure visual enjoyment.

If the intention is pure, through the experienced hand of the artist, the bridge can also lead to some new understanding. Is this too much to ask of art? “These are the things painters fantasize about,” he laughs. “It’s a lot to ask. It’s the reason that art has moved people for thousands of years, and always will.”

 

See also COPPERHAND Studio