About El Salvador RPCV Richard Sumons
Artist's Statement
When I become inspired to playfully develop a new composition of figures and elements, I actively retreat to a personal realm, a protected glade of emotions. Here brooding forms are manipulated, added, discarded, unexpected. No intentional statement is desired, but a personal acceptance of the obvious and the ironic. By animating the varied subjects I've selected, I search for a blending of naturalistic and surrealistic scenarios. I continually explore and am intrigued by the convergence and intersection of two worlds or moments in time. My bases are evolving as singular points of physical stability and allow viewers to visually create their own sense of boundary to the elements presented.
"When I sit back, look at a new composition and laugh out loud, I know I've brought a bit of myself into existence.”
Bio
At his studio in Sinking Spring, PA versatile artist Richard J. Summons creates fascinating works of art, both naturalistic and surrealistic from a wide variety of traditional materials and synthetics. He works in bronze, aluminum, stainless steel, gypsum cements, bonded metals, stoneware and porcelain.
While living in El Salvador, C.A., Rick developed the ceramics department for the Bachierato en Artes and founded the National School of Ceramics. He also taught ceramic design and 3-D design at the Philadelphia College of Art, and sculpture at both the Community School of Music and Art and the Reading Area Community College in Reading, PA.
Rick is known nationally and internationally for his bas reliefs, available in bonded metals, bronze, and as ceramic tiles.
His other world consists of the naturalistic - surrealistic works in bronze; playful compositions of turtles, toads, fish, beetles, etc. which he refers to as his "Meadowsongs."
Rick's ability to work in varied scales has garnered him many commissioned works for individuals, organizations, and for A.R.T. Research Enterprises, Inc. of Lancaster, PA including awards, medallions, life-size children and animal figures, portraiture, and monumental public art installations.
Critic
A dragon-like fish made of bronze passes through marble, stone; an apparition it appears, un-solid and ghostly. Empty, metallic gloves manipulate air or air becomes water as be-knighted turtles of the mind champion the imaginative excesses of our presumably lost collective innocence, re-capturing the humor, the wonderment, the joy found in nature. Using the most unlikely and unforgiving of materials - ceramic, bronze and steel, Richard Summons molds a curious world of fantasy innuendo and artistic inquisitiveness. His work beckons an admiration of exquisite craftsmanship fused with a cross-cultural interfacing of ideas regarding nature's multi-fold imagery. Additionally, the artist manifests a powerful physical presence and augments his imagery by incorporating heavy bases of polished marble, leaving the work unpainted, its materiality intact. He paradoxically animates a subject matter that operates within a brooding irony, as if metal and stone could not contain whimsy. Yet throughout, a respect and love of nature stands firm as his surrealistic references intersect with his personal sense of formal integrity.
Ron Schira, Arts Journalist and Critic, June 2002
