Using the intaglio process, Black creates prints that have a collage-like feeling. Tightly rendered textures and color patches are layered and structured to create overall pattern. The work appears to be abstract, but when closely examined recognizable forms sometimes emerge. These images are enigmatic and are woven into intricacy of the print, there for the viewer to decipher.
"I enjoy the process of making a print and view the process as a journey into the unseen, never the unknown, for there are many ways of knowing. The object of the image is to give physical form to those ideas and thoughts that have no physical form. I find abstraction a more expressive means for approaching the incorporeal character of these ideas, where the meaning is revealed though purely abstract relations develop amongst the visual elements."
- Richard Black
Black was a member of The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE) which was founded in 1880. All Members are elected on merit in a tradition reaching back over a hundred years. New Members are elected by the Council of the Society based on the quality of their work alone. Black won the Printmaking Today prize in the RE Annual Exhibition in 2011 at Bankside Gallery, London for his intaglio print Small Worlds: Twitter See and again 2016 for his print Penalope’s Web.
Richard Black passed away July 28, 2020 at the age of 88.
