Willy Bo Richardson

Born in Santa Fe, NM / Works in Santa Fe, NM

BIO

Willy Bo Richardson was born in Santa Fe, NM. He received an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute in 2000, was a painting tech at Cooper Union in New York and a faculty member at Santa Fe University of Art and Design. Richardson’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and featured in numerous group exhibitions including 70 Years of Abstract Painting – Excerpts at Jason McCoy Gallery. The show assembled works by a selection of modern and contemporary painters, including Josef Albers, Hans Hofmann and Jackson Pollock. He also showed a body of work in the exhibition “Watercolors” at the Phillips Auction headquarters in Chelsea New York.

I set out on this path with an unfolding understanding that what I need, and what the world seems to thirst for is consistency and quietude. My paintings are like loadstones which orient towards what has staying power. I essentially married myself to a mode of working. I do not make random choices, however. Informed by history, rooted in the craft of traditional glaze layers and inspired by vast and colorful inner and outer landscapes, when brush hits canvas I let go. I work with the tension of knowing that freedom is possible within the laws of gravity, color and compositional structures.