Iris Tango
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I've loved trees, plants and flowers since childhood in the southern states when my mother, brothers and I followed my Navy pilot father from one base to another. Though not botanical illustrations, my paintings capture the essence of the living thing. They record a place, a time, who was there, what happened, how I felt then and how I feel now. They are musings on color and seasons, growth and change.
Some of my earliest memories are of flowers -- violet, wisteria, shrimp plant, palmetto, canna, gardenia, and some kind of pink lily that seemed to just appear overnight. They marked the location of my many homes, the absence or presence of a loved one, my state of mind. I'm interested in their origins and names, their legends and symbolism. I've always had a garden and loved wild flowers. I muse on the thought that human life is like a plant: each one grows, flowers, dies and returns, maybe from the same root, maybe from a new seed. I combine drawing, painting, collage and printmaking to make large altered monotypes. My pictures begin as drawings, move through a press as monotypes, and then become paintings. Most include collage on the thinnest papers I can find, colored pencil, dry and oil pastel, metallic leaf and pigments, or whatever else it takes to finish a piece. All of this work was done using lightweight Plexiglas plates. Usually I work on them in pairs, exploring pale-intense, positive-negative, lively-retiring, orderly-chaotic, rhythmic-random and other dualities in the art and myself, going where they take me.
-- April Richardson
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