Bio and Statement
Paul Richmond is an internationally recognized visual artist and activist whose career has included exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States, as well as publication in numerous art journals and anthologies. In his role as the Associate Art Director for Dreamspinner Press and their young adult imprint, Harmony Ink Press, he has created over four hundred novel cover illustrations. He is a co-founder of the You Will Rise Project, an organization that empowers those who have experienced bullying to speak out creatively through art. Born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, Paul now lives with his husband Dennis in Monterey, California. He works and teaches at Open Ground Studios in Seaside, California.
Paul Richmond artist
Voter profile/November 2020
Paul and the models talk about the importance of voting
February 2020 Love is Love
Love is Love Show
In February 2020 Paul sent this new piece, and this is what he had to say about it:
The show explores all facets of love (not just the traditional Valentiney ones), so we thought it would be a great time to share this painting with my Columbus friends/family because it’s about the love I have for my dad. I painted this shortly after he passed away unexpectedly when I was at a conference in Florida several years ago. Even though I didn’t see him or even talk to him every day, his absence left an overwhelming emptiness that I struggled to accept (and still do). As I worked on this piece, I kept thinking about the concept of positive and negative space. It’s one of the first things you learn in art school. Positive space is the stuff — the subject matter. Negative space is what’s around it — the background, the empty part. Most art students start out only wanting to focus on the positive space, but the shapes you create with the negative are just as important compositionally. Losing someone who is such a fundamental part of who I am left an unfillable void. My dad is no longer the positive space, the tangible presence in the foreground of my life. But I can still find him in the gaps and crevices he carved out along the way — the backgrounds, the negative spaces — everything from the small openings to the vastness of the entire world that he laid out and molded into tangible bits for me as I grew up. Those spaces hold his shape and always will. The negative space has become the positive. I guess that’s what this painting came to be about.