An empty canvas, apparently really empty, that says nothing and is without significance. Almost dull, in fact. In reality, however, [it's] crammed with thousands of undertone tensions and [is] full of expectancy. Slightly apprehensive lest it should be outraged ... It can contain anything but cannot sustain everything ... An empty canvas is a living wonder -- far lovelier than certain pictures."
- My Polish mate, Wassily Kandinsky
Artists like Richard McSweeney are put on this planet to live an extraordinary life. These artists are born with innate knowledge of their own abilities. I'm sure you know someone who decided to be an actor or a painter at a young age, and stuck with it until reaching their goal.
Most of us, however, spend our lives searching for that purpose feeling fearful and unhappy, yet afraid to take the risks involved with change. Richard's creations are the most impressive debuts at Julian Ashton of an emergent painter in recent years. Richard tries to distill more than a mustard seed or the grain of truth in his masterpieces.
The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.
-Lucien Freud
*Painted by Richard McSweeney during 2005
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the [enlightened] place where it leads.
- Erica Jong
Above all Richard keeps his imagination and colours fresh. An abstract of warmness in the rainbow forest of love.
*Richard is well aware that art is really people asking the eternal question, What is it all about?
*Sacred Trees by Richard McSweeney - drawn and imagined in his studio at 3/25 Mona Road - DARLING POINT 2027
The essential of painting is that something, that 'ethereal glue,' that intermediary product which the artist secrets with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial stuff of the painting.
-Yves Klein
Another masterpiece of light captured by Richard McSweeney in 2006
When I've painted a woman's bottom so that I want to touch it, then [the painting] is finished.
-Pierre Auguste Renoir
The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things -- but above all we must dare to fail. You must have the courage to be bad -- to be willing to risk everything to really express it all.
- John Cassavetes