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Michael Rich

Breach
oil on canvas, 34 x 38 x 1.5 inches

Orquevaux Trees III
watercolor, 30 x 22 x 0.15 inches

Orquevaux Series XI
mixed media, 22.5 x 15 x 0.1 inches

Orquevaux Series XIV
mixed media, 22.5 x 15 x 0.1 inches

Ziggy's Tree I
watercolor, 20 x 13 x 0.15

Ziggy's Tree II
watercolor, 20 x 13 x 0.15 inches

Michael Rich, graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, (BFA 1991) and the Savannah College of Art and Design, (MFA 1997) is currently a professor of art at Roger Williams University, Bristol, Rhode Island. Time spent around the waters of Nantucket Island and 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 his work today.

A dedicated practitioner of yoga, Rich is influenced greatly by Eastern philosophy and art in an approach to nature and landscape as a wellspring for spiritual investigation and meditation.

“My paintings and drawings of the past decade have explored through the language of abstraction the notion of place. Places once visited, invented or discovered, vaguely take shape in the colors of space and light. 

The gray skies of Providence, the expanses of sky and sea surrounding Nantucket Island, the warm of New England Fall, are subjects now mined in my work. In an effort to understand my own place among these fleeting images, I seek a language that draws on personal history as well as the history of painting while forging a new path between abstraction and the realization of the image of place.”

Michael Rich is exhibited in galleries across the country. His work is contained in museum, corporate and private collections.