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Richard Garrison

Having received training and gained experience in a variety of areas, including carpentry, computer operations, forestry, merchandise distribution, cabinet making, dry cleaning service, cooking, dishwashing, anthropology, and picture framing, Garrison focused on the visual arts in 1980. He attended North Carolina State University where he was able to take many courses at the School of Design, before transferring to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Visual Art. He received his BFA there in 1985, and attended a year of graduate school in Art Education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He taught high school Art for six years, while beginning to show, sell, and win numerous awards and one grant for his work.

Since becoming a full-time working artist in 1993, Garrison’s work has focused primarily on the figure and still-life. Though the work has taken many subtle shifts over the years, from realistic to more abstracted images, straight painting to mixed media explorations, or the conceptual to the spontaneous, he has always sought to honestly connect with the viewer through a depth of feeling and representation of universally shared experience.

ARTIST STATEMENT
From painting the human figure to painting trees, I have always been interested in the abstract qualities of the subject - line, shape, color, and so on, while trying to give the subject a real presence. I continue this interest in my current series I call TREESCAPES. While these paintings are obviously based on tree branching, they are spontaneously created from memory, rather than from any actual trees, and I think of them as lines, colors, and shapes of certain qualities referring to Nature. They are as much about a specific light, weather condition, time of year, and my response to those effects and conditions, as they are about trees.

My wife and I live near Chapel Hill, NC in an area adjacent to Nature Conservancy land, surrounded by a towering canopy of trees. I am fascinated with the timeless aspect of that canopy, the seeming chaos of lines guided by a certain order, the natural thrust toward light while rooted firmly in the Earth, the morphic similarities with circulatory and nervous systems, lightning, the movement of water through the landscape, veining in rock, and the strength, the grace, and at the same time the fragile balance in Nature. All of this reminds me daily of the need to protect and preserve the natural world around us, which in essence is a matter of the preservation of ourselves as parts of the whole.

COLLECTIONS
Karl Walter Lindenlaub, Cinematographer (Independence Day, Stargate, The Princess Diaries)
City of Raleigh, Raleigh, North Carolina.
Capitol One, Richmond, Virginia.
Bank of America, Charlotte, North Carolina.
Wall Street Investor Services, New York, New York.
Sprint Nextel, Reston, Virginia.
SAS Institute, Cary, North Carolina.
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.
Duke Education Corporation, Durham, North Carolina.

LECTURES
A Retrospective of my work  Friends of the Gregg Museum, Raleigh, North Carolina 2011

EDUCATION
Art Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, B.F.A., 1985.