The Nashville Scene
September 28, 2006

By David Maddox

Feaster engaged in the extremely meticulous construction of order. Feaster’s paintings in this show involve controlled drops of pigment on panel and paper that create curtains of color, most overlaid on a few graphite grid lines and over painted with elliptical shapes. Feaster experiments with a variety of pigments made from metals like aluminum and pewter. The metal-based pigments shimmer as the metal flakes pick up light.

These paintings have a high level of craft. The exotic pigments recall Renaissance artists who mixed their paints according to secret personal recipes, mixtures that might include material like ground glass to enhance the color. And Feaster handles the pigment with utmost care. Feaster practices an art that requires deep technical commitment, and is attuned to the visual seductions of metallic colors.

The Boston Globe
Thur March 30, 2000

By Cate McQuaid

Richard Feaster's abstract paintings start with a wave pattern on the outskirts that sweeps us dizzily into the center, where we find an intricate, subtle, and chaotic crosshatching that sometimes recalls ice crystals forming on glass. Feaster paints with metal pigments, and the patterns and crosshatching appear in sublte, shifting layers of gray. It's a lovely pulse between the sense of pattern on the borders and the chaos of the non-pattern within.

The Nashville Scene
March 25, 2004

By Nicole Pietrantoni

New York artist Richard Feaster returns to his Nashville roots for a showing at Zeitgiest. his new series, "Plumbago" - a historic term for graphite - features immense monochromatic surfaces that appear abstract and noisy, but upon closer examination are filled with hypnotic patterns in soft layers of ground zinc, pewter and graphite. The result is a glowing tapestry of symbols and allusions to scientific illustration and geophysical processes.

Essay by Susan Knowles, Independent Curator, 2006
Written for Temporary Contemporary Solo Exhibit at the Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN

Richard Feaster’s dazzling abstractions are both luxuriant and minimal. While the shapes of his canvases are unfailingly rectilinear, the gestural quality of his mark making is organic and alive. In his oil and alkyd paintings on canvas and panel, the curving gestures of his paintbrush create a delicate pattern as lacy as dew on a spider web and as see-through as screen wire mesh. In the graphite paintings of his recent Plumbago series, the shiny brownish-gray strokes form subtle patterns across the page, like waves lapping on sand. In this exhibition, Feaster’s use of multiple art mediums in every piece gives them a changeable allure that can never be captured in reproduction. Surfaces ripple with clear smooth passages intersected by rough matte finishes and textures, and sparkle with glints of metallic pigments such as aluminum, graphite and pewter. In Bunny Brains (2005) our eyes follow the lines, dipping above and below brushstrokes that sometimes reveal patches of strong color underneath, like a sudden snowstorm obscuring a brilliant blue sky. But even with these hints of transience, the overall surfaces feel even and stable, like a steady breeze or the constantly moving ocean. In every instance, Feaster manages somehow to create a superb balance.

For Temporary Contemporary, Feaster has decided also to show his drawings, allowing viewers an intimate look at process and material. The use of dry pigments is almost magical. How are they applied? What holds them? Looking closely at individual specks of color or metallic dust resting on a sheet of paper feels quite intimate. The drawings are partial—single ideas, first gestures, and experimental forms. These single layers allow us to realize how complex Feaster’s finished works really are. Indeed, the drawings feel like parts of a whole—somewhat akin to single cells of animation, which are sequenced and overlapped to make cartoons. The analogy is not so farfetched, for in Junk Drawing and Jungle Drawing (both 2003); Feaster professes an interest in the offhand gestures of the early Disney animators when artists employed as day laborers drew quickly to get to an image. They often filled in with zigzags, loops, or x marks in place of careful crosshatching, but these quick draw marks were also artistic signatures of a kind, and Feaster, in typical post-modern fashion, is interested in reading between those lines.

This gallery of paintings and drawings, entitled “Eligible Receiver,” crackles with energy. Although nothing is literal, we feel at first glance as if we are reading an almost decipherable language. Looking again, we begin to find pictorial depths in the otherwise flat images and perhaps imagine some recognizable forms. But neither casual observation nor close examination yields anything beyond a firm conviction that this is a singular vision expressed through wholly original means. With the exhibition’s title, Feaster refers to a sense that these images have somehow come to him—a sort of spiritual automatism that can be traced as far back as artists’ words have been recorded.

Susan Knowles, Independent Curator