Richard J. Watson

The Known Soldier: abstract painting w/ found objects, photographs, Black figure

2021

"Same Tune Different Drummer" is an acrylic collage painting with photograph portraits and a number of found objects integrated into the painting such a as military reference such as drums, guns, bullets, American flags, and imagery referencing American history. This painting "collects fragments from the artist's everyday life -- discarded objects found on the streets of Philadelphia that are saved and later repurposed to germinate an idea." Signed and dated by the artist. Already framed (with a second frame collaged into the work). All hanging hardware included and ready to install on your wall. "Most of my works are supported by memories of the past and suggested realities. Issues of social politics, ancestral references, and astral projections are presented with fragmented elements...

Please contact me with zip code for precise shipping rates. "And the Beat Goes On" is a large acrylic collage painting with photograph portraits integrated into it, as well as found objects, and text. It includes imagery that references African American history and cultural references on the Black community. Signed by the artist. PROVENANCE: Exhibited in "Portals + Revelations: Richard J. Watson," the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Oct 2021 - Mar 2022. "Most of my works are supported by memories of the past and suggested realities. Issues of social politics, ancestral references, and astral projections are presented with fragmented elements of 'real life' collaged and collapsed, as dreams are prone to do. If connections are made, all the better. I feel that life should remind us of our dreams." - Richard J. Watson Richard J. Watson is an icon in the Philadelphia art world. Much of his work relates to his experiences as a Black African American man. He is a graduate of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1968), has taught at his alma mater, and has served in the Exhibitions Department at the African American Museum in Philadelphia since the 1980s. He has been exhibiting his work for decades, and has an extensive bibliography. His work is held in the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Uniworld Corporation; Sony; the Federal Reserve Bank; the City of Philadelphia; Sprint; the Church of the Advocate; the poet Dr. Sonia Sanchez; and the Woodmere Museum...

Available at Madelyn Jordon Fine Art. 'Marblemanandfaith' by Stanley Boxer, 1991. Oil and mixed media on canvas, 8 x 4 in. / Frame: 9 x 4.5 x 2...

This depicts civil rights icon MLK, the Statue of Liberty, Iwo Jima, an assemblage of mixed media photographic images and painted collaged elements. A powerful, moving work, an ode to the black civil rights movement. John M. Mitchell is originally from North Carolina, and as an art student at North Carolina Central University, he was involved with the Civil Rights movement including participating and getting arrested at a sit-in protest in Durham in 1963. After graduating, he was one of the first art teachers to take a position at the newly integrated schools in his home state. Mitchell continued his education in the 1990s and earned an MFA in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1993. He later served as a professor there from 1998-2006. Of his inspiration to create, Mitchell says: "A lot of my work is based on my experiences during the Civil Rights movement," he says. "I see art making as a 'record' of experiences. My bittersweet past, growing up in the segregated South, inspires the content, focus and narrative of my work." Savannah-based artist John Mitchell believes that a home is more than a simple edifice. Rather, he argues that the sociological, psychological, architectural, and historical associations embedded in the structure “tell us about our culture, our lives. It tells us about where we come from.” Mitchell's signature shotgun house constructions, crafted from found materials and scraps of newspaper headlines, reference his childhood in North Carolina, where such modest architectural structures were once commonplace. In "ALA 1963," he uses the shotgun shape to create a heartfelt memorial to a group of African-American girls killed in a racially motivated church bombing in Alabama nearly 50 years ago. He also incorporates the shotgun symbol in "Victims," a powerful reflection upon crime in Savannah in the early 1990s, which reveals how little has changed over the past two decades. Mitchell's mixed media constructions operate, in many ways, like memory itself. Scraps, fragments and pieces loosely cohere around a central idea, making symbolic and metaphorical connections. In these richly narrative and boldly stream-of-conscious assemblages, the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts. Mitchell's jazz collages...