Richard Glick

My paintings reflect my experience—the changes I’ve gone through in my life—the new things, the old things, the past, and the present. Each painting is an experience that takes time and it’s created in stages. I add and delete elements as I paint and often return to old paintings to recreate and reinvent them. In some ways, I never really see a painting as finished.

The things that interest me aren’t representational, they are emotional and universal: the feeling of space and texture and layers. The designer in me sees the balance of composition, color, shape, and scale.

Several of my paintings are named with the word beyond in the title, something I think about very often. Why beyond? I think it’s because I’m fascinated by the primitive and infinite beauty of how I imagine space to be beyond our vision and our own environment. It’s bigger than I am, bigger than we are. But the realities of a canvas—its edges, lines, and borders—serve as a metaphor for the boundaries that I place on myself. I’m a naturally private person with a narrow comfort zone. The adding and removing of layers of paint speak to my desire to hide from the unknown. But being private doesn’t mean being isolated. I am surrounded by family and friends. In the end, I am both excited by—and hesitant to enter—the world that exists beyond my control.