Dawson Cole Fine Art, Carmel-by-the Sea

08/06/2026

As a sculptor, Richard MacDonald has accepted only a few commissions.⁠
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He came up as an illustrator, where the work was all commissions, other people directing the outcome, the deadline, the vision. That life is what he walked away from. Sculpture was the freedom to answer only to himself, so a commission is a rare thing for him. The only time he says yes is when he is moved to make the work anyway, when he would have created it regardless of who asked. Never for the money. It has to mean something. It has to be his.⁠
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So in 2008, when the Royal Ballet approached him, the expected answer was no. But he flew out to meet them, and something took hold. The way Dame Ninette de Valois had built the Royal Ballet and its school, the standard she held, the belief that the figure could carry meaning. It was the same conviction that had shaped his own path for decades. And then he learned that he and de Valois, the woman who founded it all, shared the same birthday. June 6th.⁠
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Her philosophy and that shared day spoke to something in him. This was work he was meant to make. He set out to create a monument in her honor.⁠
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He began where he always begins. In his Monterey studio, with live dancers, working from life. Dance had drawn him from the earliest days of his career, the line of a body in motion, the discipline behind it. Now that pull had come full circle, and he would be working with some of the greatest dancers in the world. These early works, Penché, Pas de Deux, Sissone, Swan Lake, began here in Monterey, before he established studios at White Lodge and Covent Garden in London.⁠
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07/23/2026

At 60, Richard MacDonald did what he has always done at a defining moment: he pushed further.

The platinum patina was introduced to mark that milestone, a deliberate evolution from everything that came before. Where Blanc Noir had worked through contrast, stark and architectural, platinum works through something quieter and more luminous. Light doesn't just reflect off these surfaces. It moves across them.

Warm, silvery, and rare, the platinum patina creates a play of light that heightens every line of the underlying form. As mercurial as human nature itself, light glances off the surface casting dramatic shadows that seem to strengthen the sculpture and deepen the sense of life the artist has captured.

These are not decorative choices. Each patina is a composition, arrived at through the same rigor MacDonald brings to the clay itself. The platinum series is limited to editions of only eight, with select works existing as one of a kind.

Daybreak. Nightfall. Chroma. Dreams. Each a different quality of light. Each a different moment, from the first light of morning to the drama of movement to the quiet of a dream, held permanently in bronze.

The surface and the subject are inseparable. They always have been.

Learn more about Richard MacDonald's artistic journey: https://website-dawsoncolecm.artlogic.net/news/6-richard-macdonald-the-beginning-of-a-life/

Images: Daybreak Platinum · Nightfall Platinum · Chroma Platinum · Dreams Quarter Life Platinum

07/14/2026

Richard MacDonald has spent more than four decades in pursuit of a single question: what is the human form capable of expressing? Through every chapter of a career that has never stopped moving, one belief has never changed.

Art is not a privilege. It belongs to everyone who feels it.

The Atelier Collection is the expression of that conviction. A deliberate act of creative generosity from an artist who has always believed that great sculpture deserves the widest possible audience. Not a compromise. Not a concession. The full ambition of his most iconic works, realized at a scale and a price point that opens the door to anyone drawn to the work.

He personally selects which works become part of the collection, drawing from his most iconic pieces, works that have sold out at larger scales or are close to it. He applies the same exacting eye to every selection that he brings to the clay itself. Does it carry the same conviction at this scale? Does it still stop you? Only then does it belong here.

Each piece is sculpted, cast, and hand-finished with a unique patina in his Monterey studio and foundry using the ancient lost-wax method. Every bronze is a limited edition, individually numbered and signed by the artist himself.

A lifetime of work. Every discipline. Every series. Every subject.

Made for everyone.

Watch Richard MacDonald speak about the Atelier Collection in our linkin.bio

07/10/2026

Bronze holds stillness. Water is never still.

For thousands of years, artists have been unable to resist the Three Graces.

Raphael painted them. Canova sculpted them. Botticelli placed them at the center of his most celebrated work. Each generation finds in them something worth returning to: the blessings of nature, the embodiment of beauty, the belief that grace itself can be given form.

Richard MacDonald is no different. And yet entirely his own.

Where Botticelli expressed the soft, linear forms of classical mythology and sparked a renaissance, MacDonald set out to foster a new one, employing the same classical tradition of undulating lines and precise contour, brought forward into the present through his own unmistakable hand. He has always been drawn to subjects that have withstood the test of centuries. The Three Graces have withstood millennia.

When he turned his attention to the fountain as a sculptural form, the Graces were the inevitable choice.

Their mythology is inseparable from the natural world, from water, from the living forces that move through the earth. Followers believed that each spring, their fertility dance caused seeds to sprout and flowers to bloom. Crowning a towering column of hand-worked bronze, figures reaching upward while the water descends, they inhabit the fountain as though they were always meant to be there.

The water does not distract from the sculpture. It completes it.

07/07/2026

Richard MacDonald has never stopped being a painter.⁠
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In 2002, the surface of the bronze began to say something new.⁠
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Blanc Noir. The name says it precisely: white and black, light and dark, the starkest possible conversation between shadow and form. Where earlier bronzes carried the warmth of traditional patinas, these works speak in contrast. The dark recedes. The light holds.⁠
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It was the first deliberate step in what would become a lifetime of patina philosophy, the beginning of a practice of treating the bronze surface not as a finish but as a final act of composition.⁠
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The sculpture hadn't changed. But what the surface was saying had.⁠
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Images: Brenda Blanc Noir · Jacques Half Life, Blanc Noir · Three Trumpeters Blanc Noir · Rain Heroic Blanc Noir⁠

07/02/2026

Richard MacDonald has always believed art should be accessible to everyone. Some works make that belief permanent, cast in bronze, standing in the open air, free for the world to see.

In 2000, MacDonald was commissioned to immortalize a once-in-a-century moment: the 100th US Open Golf Tournament at the legendary Pebble Beach Golf Links, right in his own backyard.

The result is a 16-foot monument that stands permanently at Pebble Beach, capturing the anatomy of the perfect golf swing as it encircles centuries of excellence, past, present, and future. Engraved on its base are the names of 100 champions, alongside a special bronze plaque honoring 2000 winner Tiger Woods. On the reverse, space awaits the next 100 champions yet to be crowned.

A monument built for the ages, by an artist who thinks in exactly those terms.

The golf studies MacDonald created in preparation for the monument are available to view at the link below.

https://website-dawsoncolecm.artlogic.net/artworks/categories/9-us-open-olympics/

06/11/2026

Working with Jordi Caballero, MacDonald immersed himself in the sensual composition of the dance with the same obsessive attention he brought to every subject before. He didn't watch from the outside. He became part of it. While he worked, the artist became part of the dance, and the finished sculptures contain that energy long after he stepped away.

Some say the word flamenco comes from the Spanish, flama. Flame. It shows.

Three moments. Three stages of the passionate dance.

Capeo. The body gathering itself, the flame not yet lit.

Suspension. The dramatic moment where movement and emotional intensity blur into one.

Braceo. The declaration. Passion made permanent in bronze.

The touch of the artist's hand remains palpable in the surface, as if he has just now put down his tools and stepped away.

Images: Capeo · Suspension · Braceo

06/07/2026

06/05/2026

Richard MacDonald has never observed from a distance. Every subject he has ever chosen required him to enter it completely. And in the tango, where touch is not a metaphor but the entire point, he found a subject that demanded exactly that.

Working with internationally renowned dancer Jordi Caballero and his partner Zita Gonzalez, MacDonald immersed himself in the sensual composition of the dance, becoming part of it rather than a witness to it. The finished sculptures contain that energy long after he stepped away.

Some say the word tango comes from the Latin, tangere. To touch. It shows.

The studies capture the couple at various stages of their passionate abrazo, the total embrace. You can hear the familiar tempo and melodic phrasing of the music as you look at them. Viewed together they make a moving statement about love and fatality, joy and sorrow.

The touch of the artist's hand remains palpable in the surface, as if he has just now put down his tools and stepped away.

Images: Tango Study I · Tango Study II · Tango Study III