Richard Morin – Faces from the Past
Richard Morin is an amazing artist born in Quebec in 1963. Working mainly in oil, he creates stunning and slightly bizarre artwork. Morin’s surprising worlds are often fragmented into pieces, they are found in the fleeting colors of his own memories. The portraits emerge dreamily, in soft-focus, from beautifully textured backgrounds. Shapes and forms of his characters are extremely unusual. He often paints faces with the bodies of birds, animals etc. His faces have a luminous quality to them, reminiscent of Vermeer, a painter whom Morin admires and counts among his influences. But while the faces are the initial point of interest, it’s the textures that are truly arresting, in muted colors of sunset: chartreuse, azure, oxblood and ochre. The artist explained that his backgrounds are reworked images of old walls, frescoes cracked pavement, rusted metal, fabric motifs, even his grandmother’s old button box.
