Description
Edited by Silvie Turner
With essays by Tessa Sidey and Vivienne Light
This catalogue raisonné represents the first complete cataloguing of Brian Rice’s graphic work and celebrates almost 60 years of this major artist’s activity. Rice’s singular career covers a period of remarkable dedication and innovation as a successful and highly-productive painter and printmaker. This work catalogues the stylistic shifts in his printmaking and documents his visual language in a way that has not been seen before.
Living in Somerset until he was twenty, it was the period from 1962 to 1978 when he lived and worked in London that marked the formative years in this artist’s career, strengthening both the conviction of his abstract work and his reputation. In 1978 Rice rejected London, its art scene and abstract painting and, buying a 50-acre farm in West Dorset, he immersed himself in farming – his only contact with the art world was teaching at Brighton Polytechnic. He did, however, continue to work slowly, developing a visual language that was part of a dialogue with the past, inspired by marks made by prehistoric man and the archaeology of the Dorset landscape. In 1995 he had his first solo exhibition for 16 years, a point which marked Rice’s renewed commitment to life as an artist.
Always an unconventional printmaker, Rice’s recent association (from 2006) with the publishing/printing house Artizan Editions encouraged a series of works where the primacy of experiment is apparent. The essence of Rice’s work remains in the area of colour and simple forms, with this instinctual insight represend in each line, plane and colour in which the viewer is invited into a dialogue with the work. This catalogue raisonné examines the progress of his printmaking oeuvre, setting it in the context of his life from the first print made at Yeovil School of Art in 1953 to the present time.
ISBN 978-1-908326-36-2
300 x 245mm
240 pages
Softback
