by Carol Mowdy Bond Artwork courtesy of Jean Richardson
“The horse as a real being is lovely in itself,” says artist Jean Richardson, known for her horse paintings.
“Horses are a metaphor for motion, energy, beauty, and power. I love the image of the horse.”
Richardson, born in Hollis, Oklahoma, grew up around horses, and her parents were from ranching families. At age eight, she took art lessons at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas. With her love of art, her schoolteachers encouraged her and even gave her art supplies. Then she majored in art during college, earning a degree at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. And she continued her artistic journey, studying at the Art Students League of New York and in France.
Today, Richardson’s home and large freestanding studio are on an acreage with a pond near Oklahoma City.
She says, “Oklahoma has all I need for inspiration, with waving reels of grass, gorgeous skies, seasons that change colors, and horses right next door in the pasture. I’m a happy camper!”
The Horse as a Symbol
Having been a full-time professional artist for almost 60 years, Richardson creates in various media, including drawing and sculpture. But she is best known as a contemporary abstract artist, using jewel tones and deep earthen hues for her large, abstract paintings of horses.
“My crayon drawings are my contact with this natural world,” Richardson says.
“The paintings, on the other hand, are my attempts to take this image (the horse) and make of it a symbol — the horse as a metaphor for the human spirit unbridled, striving, sometimes heroic, often restless, full of energy, floating above us, calling us to other realms. Sculpture came to me through
my New York gallery, which sent me to a French sculptor to help me produce two editions of bronze sculptures that captured my abstract horses in three dimensions. It was a fun, midcareer adventure.”
Richardson’s paintings are included in prestigious private and public collections across the United States. The list of her accolades, periodical articles, solo exhibitions, and hangings in public collections is lengthy. In 2014, Richardson’s painting
“Horse as Icon” hung in the East Gallery of the Oklahoma capitol. Richardson’s art is preserved in various publications, including
Plains Myths and Other Tales, a catalog of her paintings, published by John Szoke Graphics in 1988.
Art historian Dr. Joan Carpenter Troccoli’s book Turning toward Home: The Art
of Jean Richardson traces Richardson’s development as an artist and includes more than 250 reproductions of her paintings, prints, sculptures, and drawings.
Troccoli says, “… in her painting she transforms reality rather than repudiates it. But Richardson’s reality is not that of everyday external appearances. She generates her paintings from spontaneous gestures…. This gives much of her art the feeling of a balancing act. The viewer has the sense of being on the edge of something, of trying to grasp a vision that slides in and out of focus.”
Richardson’s art now hangs in various galleries, including Ventana Fine Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Royce Myers Gallery, Tulsa; Kneeland Gallery, Ketchum, Idaho; Newbury Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; JRB Art, Oklahoma City; Hyde Gallery, Springfield, Missouri; and Mirada Fine Art Gallery, Denver, Colorado.
Inspiration from the Past and Present
Describing Richardson’s art, the Mirada Fine Art Gallery website says, “The literal subject of Jean Richardson’s dramatic works, the equine figure, is actually used to portray her true focus — a visual illustration of the human spirit.”
The global online website Artnet says,
“Jean Richardson is an artist whose paintings are a mixture of raw power, movement, and fractured form and color. Her canvases take inspiration from the ancient cave paintings of Lascaux and 20th-century Modernism. Her surfaces are pure paint and spring from a completely spiritual and personal source.” Lascaux is a Paleolithic cave system in southwestern France which contains some of the most famous prehistoric cave paintings in the world, dating from about 17,000 to 15,000 B.C.E. It includes about 600 paintings, primarily of animals — mostly horses.
With no time frame for completion of her paintings, Richardson says, “I have several going on at once, and sometimes add details years after I began the painting.” And thus her energetic, beautiful paintings of horses evolve.
Richardson’s art is available at galleries and on her website, https://www.jeanrichardsonstudio.com.
