b. 1968 Charlottesville, VA

Artist and professor, Michael Rich approaches painting as a means of exploring landscape and the natural world through the language of contemporary abstraction. A life spent around the woods and waters of New England has helped to shape a love and interest in the natural rhythms of color that remain a focal point in his work today.  Michael comes to the process of painting “free of preconceptions” and aims to discover poetic spaces of memory through painting that is visceral, physical and colorful.

A frequent traveler, Michael has enjoyed extended stays in both France and Italy, taking time in the landscape to draw, paint and visit the great museums of Rome, Paris, Venice and Florence. These trips find deep resonance in his work long after he has returned to his home studio.  A recent trip to Monet’s home and gardens in Giverny, for example, provided example on a deeper level of the connection between art and nature in the work of the painter.

Educated at the Rhode Island School of Design, The University of Georgia in Cortona, Italy and the Savannah College of Art and Design, Michael Rich has been a Professor of Visual Arts at Roger Williams University for twenty-five years. His work is featured in numerous private and public collections, including, The Smithsonian Museum; The RISD Museum; The Bronx Museum of the Arts; The Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans and the Springfield Museum of Art.  His work has been exhibited internationally, including recently during the 2022 Venice Biennale at the European Cultural Centre, Venice.

Michael Rich is a Professor of Visual Arts at Roger Williams University and lives and works in Rehoboth, Massachusetts where he is a co-founder of 3 Gables Studios with his wife, the painter, Monica Lee Rich.

Abstraction and Nature

It has been said that all politics is local, and one can’t help but wonder whether all art is local, that is, grounded in a response to a particular environment. This certainly seems the case with Michael Rich’s paintings. A Southerner by birth, a New Englander by choice, and Italian in sensibility, Rich states: “A lifetime spent around the island waters of Nantucket and later, the hills of Cortona, Italy helped to shape a love and interest in landscape and natural rhythms of color that remain very much a focal point in [my] work today.” Rich paints abstract landscapes, more particularly, expressionistic landscapes that reflect what the art historian Meyer Schapiro called the modern painter’s preference for “the spontaneous” and “the immediately felt,” involving “delight in color and movement” as well as “individual fantasy” suggestive of “inner freedom.” Schapiro adds that the modern abstract painter often discovers his “subjects on the canvas while at work.” (1)

But Rich clearly knows his subject beforehand: the issue is how to record his sensations of nature, and the feelings they evoke in him, not how to represent some familiar aspect of it. Rich is a modernist painter, sensitive to his medium, but for him paint is not an end in itself - however purely he paints - but a means to an emotional and even existential end: the articulation of the feeling of being alive in the presence of nature--always stimulating and at times almost overstimulating, as the intensity of Rich’s colors and complexity of his rhythms suggests. For Rich sensitivity to paint is inseparable from sensitivity to landscape, and the fluid density of landscape is best conveyed by the fluid density of paint…

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