Biography
Born in 1952 in Southsea, England, Richard Bolingbroke had an early aptitude for art, but discovered his own unconventional route to becoming an artist. He studied for a year at the Winchester College of Art, going on to study geography at London University, where he received his degree in 1973. His early involvement was with sculpture and conceptual photography, exploring the interplay of chance, illusion, and reality. With his personal discovery of the power of color, those interests gave way to the pursuit of painting.
Essentially self-taught, Bolingbroke developed his watercolor technique during his travels in Central Asia during the 1970s, which culminated in a five-year stay in India, a period devoted to both painting landscapes and to spiritual study.
Bolingbroke sees his art as a melding of Eastern and Western cultural influences. There is his interest in Japanese aesthetics, expressed in his watercolors through the use of boldly graphic kimonos. His engagement with Buddhist philosophy comes through in the harmonizing of dualities such as the ephemeral and the fixed, the ordered and the chaotic, in his compositions. Bolingbroke sees his use of flat pictorial space as an Asian influence that contrasts to his use of Western approaches to spatial illusion. The artist perceives, as well, his connection to the tradition of botanical illustration. He cites Matisse as a major influence, for his use of color and pattern that combines sensuous painting with philosophical concerns.
Moving to America in 1981, and settling in San Francisco in 1986, Bolingbrokeâs interest shifted from landscapes to still lifes. Always based on observed reality, these early still lifes featured a bouquet of flowers in a clear vase, on a plain background. The arrangement then became flowers floating in a bowl, and then the artist slowly began adding the fruit, stones, vessels, and printed fabric that have become part of his repertoire. A new phase began in 1995, with Bolingbrokeâs first purchase in his collection of kimonos. In 2001, the watercolorsâ viewpoint moved to directly above, in the Studio Still Life series, with its highly complex arrangements that visually weave together objects and patterns. In 2003, the artist started Rituals & Meditations, which have at their center a faceted Japanese plate and his favored objects, in shrine-like meditations on lifeâs vulnerability and vitality.
Bolingbroke has shown his work extensively in many solo exhibitions, including those at the Prince Street Gallery in New York, the Rivaga Gallery in Washington D.C., and The Atrium Gallery in San Francisco, a 12-year retrospective of his work. His paintings are in many private and corporate collections, and will be part the exhibition, Watercolor USA, at the Springfield (MO) Art Museum in 2004.
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