Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jacqueline Richards
American; 20th-century
Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University
72%
The Other Side. c1995. Oil on canvas and wood panels
Richards taught briefly in Illinois and lived and exhibited in Wisconsin; her work is rare. This painting, a charmer, is all in its little touches: that one red plank-end that, echoing the vertical red band to the right, pulls the boards and the canvas toward each other; the yellow edge at canvas left that trickles out from the gap between planks and painting; the likewise yellow edge at bottom that pulls the canvas in on itself from the sides; the worked quality of the painted surface, and how heavy it seems beside the wood's grain; how that top plank just tilts barely back. The joke, of course, is in how the boards and the canvas, in their congruence, come to sort of represent each other. The one makes the other seem more virtual, the other makes the one seem more actual. In itself this is a trite operation, but Richards seems to have used it as a pretense for good design. (2024)