Bill Richards was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1944. He received a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, an M.A. from the University of Iowa, and in 1970 received an M.F.A. from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Richards’s graphite drawings are a celebration of the intimist’s view of nature and landscape, particularly of fern covered swamps. The drawings are silvery gray in appearance, looking somewhat like silverpoint in their fineness. There is little trace of gesture in these fully harmonized pieces. Richards eschews crosshatch in favor of an overall velvety smooth patina.

On his larger drawings, measuring approximately 12x18”, the artist spends about ten months developing the image of fern swamps or boggy marshland. He works in small sections, one at a time from left to right, fine tuning the piece at the end of this meditative process. In composition, the drawings bear some relationship to the development of a work in music.

In Richards’s drawings, grasses, weeds, ferns, leaves interweave in a thick and rich tapestry. The viewer does not see the horizon, but looks into a landscape that seems filled with color, though drawn in graphite only. From afar the drawings are abstract and sparkling; as one approaches, the wispy stems of nature come into crystal clear focus.

While photographs are the source of the artist’s drawings, Richards does not project a slide or copy literally what is set before him on film. Familiar in great depth with this naturescape, Richards adds and subtracts as he sees fit based on the needs of each drawing. Richards embraced the landscape that became his prime subject and captured it on film while long distance biking in the environs of New York.