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richard maude
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profile
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Over the past six
years the work of Richard Maude has been developing a strong focus
on figuration and portraiture which, for him, has brought together
many creative interests out of the experience of four decades of
commitment to a broad art practice.
Richard Maude is a visual artist who, over the past 35 years, has maintained his involvement with community by working, sometimes voluntarily, as an exhibition organizer, curator and visual arts project manager. This work has included the establishment and co-ordination of several artist-run initiatives in the 1970s and ‘80s, almost nine years as a provincial, public gallery director, then five years as a Sydney gallerist.
Born in Sydney in 1953, Richard grew up mostly in country NSW and Victoria and completed his secondary education at 16 years old after having attended eight schools. His enduring sense of place, connection to land and interest in the processes of community emanate from his outsider’s exposure to a diverse series of geographies and isolated sub-cultures with their own subtle dialects.
Richard’s earliest National Art School training, with a strong emphasis on drawing from life, gave him substantial traditional studio skills. The early 1970s saw him moving through short periods of practice in the schools of ‘colour field’ and ‘lyrical abstraction’ painting, toward ‘idea’ and ‘process’ art. Later, in the mid-‘70s, having enrolled in the inaugural year of the Alexander Mackie College, School of Art, the European and American avant-garde brought many interests together and reinforced his growing engagement with conceptual, post-object art and the new medium of video with its performative/community interactive potential.
Engaged as an assistant with several John Kaldor Art Projects in the late 1970s, Richard worked with Sol LeWitt, Richard Long and, most importantly for him, Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman. He travelled with the latter from Sydney to the Adelaide Festival and the Solomon Islands (where he also shot video for Bill Viola) and, in the process, came into contact with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, amongst others visiting Australia at the time. He subsequently exhibited work within the New York Avant Garde Festival at the World Trade Centre in 1977. These were deeply formative experiences in Richard’s aesthetic and philosophical development.
Richard Maude has spent the past forty years gathering a body of drawings, paintings and photographs, ideas and experiences across a range of media and artworld involvement. He emphasises that it is community processes, the observance of individuality within a particular environment and an exploration of our collective understanding of humanity that are the key elements forming the central focus of his work.
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