Selected Quotations
“Her horse is a symbol for the human spirit, passionate, unbridled, resolute.”
— “Turning Toward Home: The Art of Jean Richardson”
“She is adamantly devoted to an art that is abstract rather than non-objective; in her painting she transforms reality rather than repudiates it. But Richardson’s reality is not that of everyday external appearances. She generates her paintings from spontaneous gestures initiated in her subconscious. Her nearly automatist expression, in which she pursues imagery that arises from her manipulation of the medium, is risky and revealing. Richardson seeks to both develop and destroy the image, to achieve a perfect suspension of form and content. This gives much of her art the feeling of a balancing act. The viewer has the sense of being on the edge of something, of trying to grasp a vision that slides in and out of focus.”
— “Turning Toward Home: The Art of Jean Richardson”
“Jean Richardson paintings seem to express to us the spirit and energy of the American West. the wild abstracted horses of her ‘Sky Herds’ are like a pageant acted out upon the grand stage of the prairie skies. Yet the subject matter is only incidental to the emotional content of these paintings, where exuberance, grace, energy, and joy are the themes woven into painterly, textured canvasses.”