Artist's Statement

My art is a stimulus for the imagination — intriguing, often beautiful, ambiguous and mysterious, a continuing source of visual wonder. Art provides me with a way to quietly ponder the mystery of life, to accept the uncertainty and open-ended nature of any attempts to answer questions about our existence. I use particular color combinations which evoke the natural world; looking at the way nature arranges a seemingly random, richly varied texture of images and colors provides a constant inspiration for my work.

Some of my most powerful spiritual experiences occur while looking at art, when my awareness is lifted from mundane everyday reality to an inner, reflective reality. In the 1970s I first encountered painted mandalas used in Eastern spiritual meditation practices, and I saw these as a way to create emotionally positive images. My work evolved from overt mandalas to a more personal vision using shapes and colors reflecting my inner beliefs and feelings. I try to make art which provides an ongoing visual journey with many levels and layers appealing to the viewer's eyes and thoughts, to induce a spiritual or meditative state of mind. I want to look inside — inside myself, inside a painting — to be absorbed with small, intimate, subtle experiences. I encourage the viewer to explore the painting and lose the conscious self in the journey of seeing, to keep looking for a long time to make new discoveries.

My art often incorporates lettering from various alphabet traditions: I am interested in the shapes of the letterforms and the visual qualities of text, and I am fascinated with the thoughts and emotions involved in the act of writing. Lettering as a subject intrigues me because it is a record of a person using their hands with simple materials, much like painting. Letter shapes themselves evolved from an interaction between the imagination (forming abstract images) and the external eye (observing the natural world), so the lettering process is both subjective and objective. This is like a metaphor for my interest in the interplay of intuitive and rational creation. When I use legible words my mind begins to form associations of thoughts, images, memories and ideas beyond the actual painting. Sometimes I avoid creating words; I only intend the letters to be seen as abstract marks.

Although I begin with a definite "subject" and sometimes a vague composition in mind, the process by which I develop each piece seems more intuitive, subconscious and accidental than it is logical. The element of chance appeals to me because it bypasses rational thought. I am interested in the interplay between rational and irrational, artificial and natural, thought and emotion, logic and intuition. My materials are at hand and I react to their properties, at first making marks and placing colors intuitively, then reacting more deliberately to what has gone before. A relationship develops within the work of art until it becomes an object independent of my preconceptions. The work is complete when an appearance of harmony or an aesthetically interesting arrangement has evolved out of the beginning emptiness and chaos. When the art achieves a "life of its own" as if it grew from the process of its creation, then it becomes interesting. Surprise is what makes a piece of art successful in my eyes — something appears which didn't exist before it was made. The results communicate their own mystery and meaning, removed from the role of transmitting my feelings or thoughts. I try to allow each piece to be a visual stimulus for viewers to enjoy looking while letting their imaginations act freely.

The painting constitutes a message in and of itself.

— Richard Widhu