Dawson Cole Fine Art, Carmel-by-the Sea

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

06/04/2026

Some collaborations begin with a phone call. This one began with a mime.

In the early 2000s, Richard MacDonald was invited through Lincoln Motor Company to present his mime sculptures at Cirque du Soleil VIP events. It was there he first encountered the performers who would change the direction of his work.

Viktor Kee. Sasha Fedortchev. Elena Serafimovich. Stephan Choiniere. To name a few. Among some of the most gifted and well-known Cirque performers of their time. MacDonald began working with them directly as models, bringing the same obsessive quality of attention he had brought to every subject before them. The mime. The dancer. The athlete. Now applied to bodies that operated at the outer limits of what Cirque asks of the human form.

These are the early works from that first connection. Studies, observations, the first attempts to hold in bronze what these performers made look effortless. The deeper collaboration was still ahead.

Images: Elena Quarter Life · Blind Faith · Caruso Study II · Sasha on a Rope · Elena Study I · Blind Faith Quarter Life · Sasha II

06/01/2026

Eighteen months. Twenty-six feet. One decision that had nothing to do with what was possible and everything to do with who he was.

Richard MacDonald was originally approached to create a 50-foot monument for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. When politics stalled the commission, he took matters into his own hands. In 18 months he created a monument that should have taken three years. Then he gave it to the city of Atlanta and the people of the United States.

Not as a commission. As a gift.

Flair Across America stands 26 feet tall at Georgia International Plaza in Atlanta, where it has lived permanently since the 1996 Summer Games. MacDonald designed not just the sculpture but the water feature and plaza it inhabits. It was one of the most photographed images of that Olympic year, captured by Ketchum PR and seen around the world.

To get it there, two flatbed trucks crossed the country in a 10-city tour accompanied by Kurt Thomas, the gymnast who invented the Thomas Flair, the very move that inspired the sculpture. One truck carried the monument. The other followed as backup, because nothing about this journey was going to be left to chance.

As Pierre de Coubertin wrote, and Richard MacDonald has long embraced: "The essence lies not in the victory, but in the struggle."

Some works belong to everyone. A monument to the human spirit, to the pursuit of excellence, to the belief that the struggle itself is where the meaning lives. It has stood at Georgia International Plaza since 1996. Free. Open. For everyone.

That was always his intention.

05/30/2026

For Richard MacDonald, the ancient world was not a reference point. It was a destination.⁠
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The stories the ancient Greeks told around campfires millennia ago still resonate with truth and emotion we recognize today. In myth and legend he found the eternal archetypes, the hero, the quest, the endless forces of the universe, and made them breathe again in bronze.⁠
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Diana. Grace and power simultaneously. Solid as the earth and as mysterious as the moon.⁠
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The Three Graces. Where Botticelli rendered them in soft linear form, MacDonald fostered his own renaissance of figurative art, honoring the classical tradition while making it entirely his own.⁠
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Eurydice. Her circumstances place her in a world of complete vulnerability, a world inside the realm of our own experiences. Stripped of everything non-essential, her evocative power is in its immediacy.⁠
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Ancient stories. Modern truths. The kind that have never loosened their hold on our imagination.⁠
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Images: Diana Huntress · Diana Earth and Moon · Three Graces · Eurydice⁠

05/29/2026

Some stories cannot be told in words alone.

Richard MacDonald has always followed his subjects wherever they led him. The mime. The dancer. The athlete. Each one a study in what the human body is capable of expressing. But mythology asked something entirely different. Not what the body could do, but what the human spirit could endure.

For three works in his Myth and Legend series, he turned to lucite. The same sculptural process, the same obsessive study of the human form, the same hand that had shaped every mime and dancer. Rendered in a material that carries light the way bronze carries weight. Completely. Permanently.

The figures are brushed, tactile, deeply human. The surrounding forms highly polished, transparent enough to reveal the back of the front figure through the material itself. A world within a world.

Orpheo and Eurydice. Timeless love, undying passion, and the will that makes man an unconquerable creature. As Richard MacDonald wrote: "Despite our frailty, because of our vulnerability, our love can be immortal."

Regina Luminaire. Queen of Light. The counterpoint. She carries the arc of hope and the triangle of perfection, emerging from the earth, commanding the air, sovereign over the seas.

Eurydice. She exists between worlds. MacDonald gave her no armor, no symbol, no story beyond her own vulnerability. It is enough. It is everything.⁠

These works are no longer produced in lucite. What exists, exists. And it will outlast all of us.

Images: Orpheo and Eurydice, Lucite · Regina Luminaire, Lucite · Eurydice, Lucite