Bruce Ricker

River of Mystery

2001

Bruce Ricker redefines landscape art. Using an epic visionary approach, he combines an educated understanding with a lucid imagination. The results are delightful, unexpected, satisfying, and unique. Born in Columbus, Ohio in 1945, he grew up in Carmel Valley, California in the 1950s, with almost no exposure to television or city life, instead, he spent his leisure time roaming the hills and redwood canyons of rural California. In the early 1960s, he joined the Navy and became a hospital corpsman in Vietnam at the age of 17. When he returned from his service, he studied art at San Francisco State University, however, he left after two years, dissatisfied with a program that seemed to be only an indoctrination in the “proper” ideas about art. Ricker later enrolled in the U.C. Berkeley School of Architecture. Although he benefited from this discipline, he thought he had “too many curves” in him to stick to the straight path of architecture as a career. In the mid-1970s, he began painting seriously and selling his artwork to an increasingly wide audience. “I’m trying,” says Bruce Ricker, “to do the same thing George Lucas does in his movies.” That would be to create a new universe, or at least a new way of seeing what is already here. In doing so, the artist, film director, writer and actor must chart new territory which, when you think about it, is what creative life is all about. “Someone like Lucas,” continues Ricker, “must ask himself, ‘How can I present a city unlike any ever seen before?’ I ask myself this same question before I paint. I am very aware of the standard way of looking at things – the cliché – any my work is all about not falling into that trap.” Over his thirty years as a professional artist, and even longer as a lover of the land, Bruce Ricker’s motifs have become notable for their sharp detail and articulate precision. He prefers to find uncharted territory that’s rich and beautiful… and unexpected, to “give people a view they haven’t seen before. In dreams and in life, nothing is impossible.” (Victor Forbes, Fine Art, 2002)