Brian Rice

Brian Rice has enjoyed a singular career, one that has covered a period of remarkable dedication and innovation as a successful and highly-productive painter and printmaker. This work catalogues the stylistic shifts in his printmaking and documents his visual language in a way that has not been seen before. Living in Somerset, England until he was twenty, it was the period from 1962 to 1978 when he lived and worked in London that marked the formative years in this artist's career, strengthening both the conviction of his abstract work and his reputation. In 1978 Rice rejected London, its art scene and abstract painting and, buying a 50-acre farm in West Dorset, England and immersed himself in farming, his only contact with the art world was teaching at Brighton Polytechnic. He continued to work slowly, developing a visual language that was part of a dialogue with the past, inspired by marks made by pre-historic man and the archaeology of the Dorset landscape. In 1995, he had his first solo exhibition for 16 years, a point which marked Rice's renewed commitment to life as an artist.
Always an unconventional print maker, Rice's recent association (from 2006) with the publishing/printing house Artizan Editions, encouraged a series of works where the primacy of experiment is apparent. The essence of Rice's work remains in the area of color and simple forms, with this instinctual insight represented in each line, plane and color, in which the viewer is invited into a dialogue with the work. This catalogue raisonnA(c) examines the progress of his printmaking oeuvre, setting it in the context of his life from the first print made at Yeovil School of Art, Somerset in 1953 to the present time.