Richard Orient

June 14 - 30, 2022

Opening Reception: Thursday, June 16, 2022 | 5-7 PM

Richard Orient has spent the last two years living and working at his home in rural Dutchess County, New York. This country setting has continually inspired him, becoming the focus of this exhibition. The earlier works in this show are of wooded scenes, with tree trunks dominating and little sky seen. Later works shift focus to deeper woods and dense thickets. These paintings are filled with branches, trunks, and tangled vines, beginning to verge on the abstract. This inspired Orient to push further into an abstract series of drawings and paintings of an accumulation of tangled lines. Using acrylic and shellac ink, he creates mazes of lines overlapping and crisscrossing, evoking the intricacies and denseness of the wooded thickets. The artist observes:

“As the pandemic continued and complicated our lives, I found the woods to be an anchor, and painting the stillness and tangle of nature, both representational and abstracted, a soothing and inspirational experience.”

Richard Orient received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1977 and has lived and painted in the New York City area since then. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the country. This is his 13th solo show at George Billis Gallery in New York City.