Richard Heisler

Richard Heisler Art

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From the Denver Post - June 2008

Artist's Black and White Vision

 From SouthwestArt magazine - June 2002

Introducing - Richard Heisler

Attracted to the simple visual aesthetic of the Amish Country, a young artist creates meticulous landscapes - By Gussie Fauntelroy

Richard Heisler has a Japanese aesthetic, an obsession with American history, an all-consuming passion for climbing boulders (the more difficult, the better), a collection of Japanese plastic bobble-head baseball hero dolls, a decidedly low-tech lifestyle, and a gentle smile.

He`s also an artist, and his striking, meticulously painted, wide-angle landscapes offer further clues into the character and convictions of this intensely focused and  amiable young man. For one, he starts his artistic process by shooting multiple side-by-side photographs of a single broad landscape, which he tapes together to create a seamless panoramic vista. He then paints from these photographs. The resulting effect is such that the viewer cannot focus on the entire image at once. Instead, the eye travels horizontally through the scene, taking it in a portion at a time.

This compositional technique has a parallel in Heisler`s approach to life. When something captures his attention, it seems, he isn`t satisfied with a casual glimpse or surface skim. He absorbs every aspect, diving in and moving all the way through with curiosity and drive. One such immersion is the story behind the 28-year old artist`s primary choice these days: the fields, farmhouses, and woods of Amish communities in eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Ohio.

As a boy, Heisler frequently visited historical sites in the eastern United States with his parents, who passed on to their son a fascination with American history. After high school Heisler moved to Seattle and one summer afterward returned to New Jersey for a visit. While there he picked up several books on the Amish, drawn to the deliberately old-fashioned ways of this devout Protestant population.

"I was really impressed with their lifestyle - with their stance on modern society and how they exclude themselves from it to preserve their sense of family, community and tradition. I saw why they shun cars and electricity and that, suprisingly, their population is growing." Heisler says leaning against the wall as he sits on the futon that takes up most of his tiny studio apartment. Like the simplicity he admires in the Amish, his room has no television or computer, and he has not owned a car since moving from Seattle to Santa Fe a year ago.

The artist refills his cup with mild green tea from a Japanese ceramic pot on the floor. "I went on a binge - I got every book I could find about the Amish," he continues. "I have a huge library if books on the Amish still in storage in Seattle."

In 1995 Heisler and a girlfriend took another trip to the East Coast to visit family. The trip, with side visits to Civil War sites, was a prelude to Heisler`s later participation in Civil War re-enactments, for which he assembled a costume and replica accessories that were authentic down to the stitches and fabric dye. In Maryland the pair visited an Amish community, and at a market in Virginia Heisler saw another book he wanted, called Hidden Treasures Handed Down from our Ancestors Since 1600. He didn`t have the money to buy the but wrote down the name and address of the Amish author. Back in Seattle he mailed the money, got the book and read it, and began corresponding with the author.

Meanwhile, Heisler had quit the college he was attending, realizing he wasn`t interested in the kind of art education he was getting there. He decided he wanted to live in Pennsylvania and paint landscapes of the well-kept Amish farms he admired. As it turned out, a series of serendipitous events resulted in his living for severeal months with an Amish family in Lancaster County, PA. Along with a dairy farm, the large family had fields of corn and other vegetables and a home-based business crafting wooden picture frames and framing art. Heisler was put to work in the frame shop on the farm.

"I went through the daily rhythms: getting up at 4 a.m., milking cows, having breakfast with the family`s eight kids, then working all day," he remembers. "I used to say I was born a hundred years too late, but living there brought all that to reality for me."

Although there was no electricity, the family had a generator with a pneumatic converter to run the milking equipment and frame shop tools by air pressure. But Heisler notes that this limited use of technology  does not detract from the cohesion of life in a community where most often the home is the place of birth, daily life and work, prayer services, aging and death. It is this aspect of a purposeful, self-supporting way of life that attracts the artist, rather than any specific religious doctrine, he says.

"What I try to capture in my paintings is the visual aesthetic I find in the Amish communities: the simple houses, the well-tended fields. It`s so simple and austere, yet everything has a purpose. I`m paying tribute to that, honoring it and showing my appreciation for those small, organic, sustainable farms.

Stored in a nook beside a small wooden table - which serves as Heisler`s work, dining, writing, and everything-else surface, are bags of photos he has taken. Many are from Amish country, but others are the basis for a recent series of landscapes from northern Texas. In these, rows of mammoth agricultural machinery and dusty, almost-extinct farm towns proclaim the primacy of large-scale agribusiness in much of the country today. These works pay homage to small American communities that are being lost.

With a fascination for Japan, Heisler hopes to travel to that country, perhaps as soon as this fall, to visit and bring back photographs of farming villages and rural landscapes. His love for Japanese culture and his interest in traditional farming communities could come together on such a trip, for which he is starting to teach himself Japanese.

One of the artist`s favorite aspects of Japanese life is baseball, especially the way the Japanese public creates true, old-fashioned celebreties of the best players. And perhaps suprisingly, he is drawn as well to ultra-contemporary Japanese pop art, such as Takashi Murakami`s work in a book called The Meaning in the Nonsense of the Meaning.

Like everything else he pursues, Heisler`s own artistic process is all consuming in its demand for concentration, precision, and time. He begins each work by creating a detailed, finely drafted drawing of the entire image. Next he then adds areas of watercolor to block out larger hues and shades in loose, organic flow. Finally he comes back in with colored pencil, adding dimension and minute detail. The result is clarity and an obvious sense of respect for the subject that explains why the artist is willing to invest so much time in his work.

But Heisler cannot be understood without mentioning the other passion that consumes large chunks of his time. When he moved to Seattle 10 years ago he discovered bouldering, a form of rope-less rock climbing that often takes the climber no higher than a dozen feet. But it`s the getting there that is the exquisite challenge, aficionados assert.

With nothing but chalk-dusted hands, muscular limbs, dexterous toes, and a pad on the ground for falls, Heisler seeks out a boulder`s tiniest crack and dimples to make his way to the top. In the process, he finds paralells with art.

"My whole focus with bouldering is to find simply the most difficult thing I can to climb. I can spend two months trying to figure out how to climb 8 feet of rock," he says. "It`s the same thing I appreciate with art: It`s very detailed. In bouldering, if there`s a little pocket in the rock and your thumb is here, or there, or if you move your hips an inch to the left or right it can make a huge difference - it`s that subtle.

"I take incremntal little steps, both in climbing and in art, and I`m continually trying to step it up. I hit something of a certain difficulty and then go on to something more difficult."

Incremental successes in bouldering, Heisler finds, bring unexpected benefits. By setting athletic goals for himself and reaching them, a sense of confidence has infused his approach to other aspects of life as well. Like art.

"It`s strange," he muses. "By going out and climbing, I can come back and think, `Now I can draw that window I was hesitating on,` where I`d done almost the whole drawing becasue I was scared of it. Climbing has kind of transformed my thinking, to know, I can actually do whatever I take on."

 From Focus\SantaFe magazine - March 2003

Simple Gifts

Richard Heisler`s work offers a bridge of understanding to a unique culture -  by Wolfgang Mabry

Richard Heisler`s wide-angle agrarian landscape paintings exert their considerable appeal on several planes. They surpassingly satisfy a plentitiude of evaluative criteria and make for a wonderful art experience. One might first be attracted by the technical virtuosity that reaches tactily but powerfully out to the viewer. By Webster`s definition of a draftsman as "an artist who excels in drawing", Heisler is a draftsman par excellence.

Meticulous and always with a purpose, Heisler draws detail with the same 20/20 accuracy he consistently achieves in his disciplined rendering of color. Skillfully apportioning of all the elements at this painter`s disposal results in as exquisite balance of analogs and opposites in light, form, texture, and theme.

The spectator may next be drawn to the authenticity of emotion eveident in Heisler`s reverentially realistic depiction of Amish buildings and their relationship to their setings and the culture that produces them. The Amish, also known as the Plain People, are an egalitarian society who lead a strictly ordered way of life. They originated in Switzerland in 1525  and opposed union of church and state and infant baptism. They faced tremendous odds in Europe and were finally saved from extinction by William Penn. His Charter of Liberty granted a haven from religious persecution in the Pennsylvania colony in 1682. The Amish have preserved their distinctive culture, language, religion, and lifeways in peace and prosperity ever since.

A strong feeling of pristine life is at the heart if this remarkable young painter`s oeuvre. His compositions are astutely balanced, reflecting the inherent balance he admires in the architecture, the land, and the community that sustains it all. Heisler paints only the evidence of a thriving community, not the individual persons who compromise it. This honors the reluctance of the Amish to be photographed or otherwise personally depicted, a custom that preserves equailty among members.

Their works, on the other hand, speak eloquently about the impressive uniqueness and accomplishments of their family and community-oriented society as a whole. Heisler`s work is therefore welcomed as a purposeful and appropriate expression of Amish place, custom and culture - a kind of bridge to understanding by the outside world.

Using both watercolor and colored pencil, Heisler gives his work a visual richness, saturation, and depth that correspond to his depth of feeling for Amish architecture and stewarship of land and legacy. An aura of the elemental and profound seems to hang about his panoramic pastoral landscapes. His ulttra-realistic style is highly detailed and suffused with the ideals of high craftsmanship in what the artist paints, and in how he paints it. In opposition to photorealist doctrines pertaining to focus and the visual effects of the camera, Heisler portrays the reality of place above other considerations.

Let the viewer`s eye wander here or there. Heisler doesn`t give any element greater emphasis or tighter focus than any other. Thus every aspect is equally valued and esteemed as indispensible in the system.

Given his extensive technical and visual vocabularies, depicting the simplicity and purposefulness of the Amish way of life comes naturally and compellingly to Heisler. As with the Amish, it is an choice for him to live without telephone, electricity, and most of the other trappings of American life.

Heisler was born in New Jersey and grew up there, in Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida, where his father`s work took the family. His parents` interst in American history inspired and informed his own early and continuing quest for authenticity and veracity in his life and in his art. His early work explored Colonial and Civil War subjects with the same attention to fidelity and thoroughness that makes his current images evocative and powerful.

With and exceptional interest in art and a precocious affinity for truth in his renderings, Heisler set himself early on a course of study that culminated in two years study at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. In this highly charged and creative milieu he was influenced by two great instructors to be the consistencies in style and subject that now set his work apart so beautifully and attract a wide and sophisticated audience.

His interest in Amish ways intensified after a return visit to New Jersey. A fortuitous series of events led to his living with an Amish Family in southeastern Pennsylvania. Drawn more to the purposeful, self-reliant, family- and community-oriented practices of the Amish than to any particular religious doctrine, Heisler thrives amid hard-working, austerely wholesome living and working customs that for many would seem relics of a distant past.

Up at 4 a.m., Heisler begins by helping with farm chores, followed by breakfast with the family at 7:30. He typically spends between six and ten hours per day painting on a naturally-lit studio. In the dark of night or winter, he uses a shaded propane lantern and actually prefers its glow to that of electricity. Lights go out at 8:30.

Beginning with a preciselly detailed drawing of the entire image, Heisler blocks out the dominant values and colors in watercolor. He uses a specific brand of wax-base colored pencils for it`s ability to "burn through" the underlying watercolor.

Contrary to all teaching about working on the whole painting the whole time, Heisler adds final details to one section at a time. He starts with the area of highest contrast and completes it first to establish value extremes. He works on one building at a time and completes most of the architecture first. Next come the trees, fields, and background, and finshes the silo last, to get exactly right the temperature, hue, and value of its strange grey.

Among Heisler`s other major interests, bouldering and sports around the farm keep him fit. His love for Japanese culture corresponds to a Japanese aesthetic with which he identifies both as an artist and as someone who finds numerous similarities in Japanese and Amish farm communities.

`Tis indeed a gift to be simple, a gift to be free. Heisler`s work is a rare gift to the eyes and to the soul.