Richard J Oliver Art

Richard J Oliver Art My name is Richard, I am a Plein Air Artist painting landscapes all over the world. Join my adventure

Upcoming Summer Art Shows | GEOSCAPEWe’re excited to be taking our new GEOSCAPE collection on the road this summer and w...
06/06/2026

Upcoming Summer Art Shows | GEOSCAPE

We’re excited to be taking our new GEOSCAPE collection on the road this summer and would love to see you if you’re attending any of these wonderful art festivals.

📍 Cherry Creek Arts Festival, Denver, CO
July 3–5
Booth #163

📍 Crested Butte Arts Festival, CO
July 31 – August 2

📍 Kimball Arts Festival, Park City, UT
August 7–9

GEOSCAPE is a collaborative body of work by me and my wife Michelle that explores our emotional connection to place through colour, shape, rhythm and memory. Inspired by the landscapes and villages of Provence, Northern France, California and beyond, these pieces are not literal maps but geometric impressions of the places that have moved us.

Drawing inspiration from the principles of the Bauhaus movement, the work embraces simplification, design and abstraction while remaining rooted in real locations and lived experience. Influences from artists such as Paul Klee and László Moholy-Nagy can be found in the balance of structure, colour and atmosphere. Each composition distils a landscape to its essential forms, creating a visual language that sits somewhere between memory, map and modernist design.

We’ll be exhibiting a brand-new collection alongside selected originals and embellished artist proofs throughout the summer season.

We hope you’ll stop by, say hello, and experience the collection in person.

🌐 .art
📧 [email protected]

Sitting here in the quiet darkness before setting up at Ojai Art in the Park, I keep thinking about why I’ve felt so pul...
05/23/2026

Sitting here in the quiet darkness before setting up at Ojai Art in the Park, I keep thinking about why I’ve felt so pulled toward painting large scale plein air this year.

A lot of it comes back to Richard Schmid and his thoughts on how we experience life visually.

My camera records the scene, but in my hands, it often misses the thing that made me stop. That is not a criticism of photography. Some photographers are extraordinary at using the camera to express feeling, atmosphere, memory, and emotion.

It is simply my limitation.

My camera can show me what was there, but it does not always show why I cared.

When I stand in front of a scene, I am experiencing it through everything else too, the air, the smell, the temperature, the sound, the memory, the mood, the whole strange accumulation of a life.

Something has usually stopped me. Something has made my heart flutter or given me goosebumps. My job is to ask what that was.

Was it the texture, the shapes, the rhythm of the lines, the composition, the chroma, or the quiet absence of it? Or was it something I can’t quite name?

For me, painting is about pointing toward what I felt.

A plein air painting becomes less like a report and more like a poem. Almost like a haiku, a simple arrangement of marks, color, and space that points toward an experience rather than explaining every detail.

That is what I’m chasing in these recent paintings.

Not just the view.

The feeling of being alive in front of it.

I have a confession to make.A few years ago, I reached out to Rosemary Brushes, who make some of the most beautiful brus...
05/23/2026

I have a confession to make.

A few years ago, I reached out to Rosemary Brushes, who make some of the most beautiful brushes I’ve ever used in my career. We worked together to create a Richard J Oliver brush set, with a portion of the proceeds going to my charity, set up to help my son Archie, who has Williams syndrome.

Rosemary brushes are, without question, some of the finest tools I’ve ever held.

But for these recent plein air paintings, especially the larger pieces, I’ve found myself reaching for 50 cent chip brushes from the hardware store.

They are rough, simple, and unforgiving. They stop me from fussing too early. They force me to avoid detail and focus on movement, structure, atmosphere, and feeling. In a strange way, their crudeness brings a kind of purity to the process.

I think I relate to them.

I’m a working class kid from South Wales, raised in a family where my dad did everything he possibly could to provide for us. When work was hard to find, he struggled, but he never once faltered in his commitment to his family. He worked with tired hands, using whatever tools he could find, fixing things, grinding through, doing everything himself so my sister and I could have opportunities.

That kind of working class mentality, when it is coupled with love and passion, is a force to be reckoned with.

So maybe that is what these brushes remind me of.

Making something beautiful from a beautiful experience, with the simplest tools available.

There is an honesty in that.

And right now, that honesty feels very close to the kind of painting I want to make.

4 AM in Ojai, waiting to set up my booth for the weekend.2 weeks ago, I drove up to Big Sur to paint large format plein ...
05/23/2026

4 AM in Ojai, waiting to set up my booth for the weekend.

2 weeks ago, I drove up to Big Sur to paint large format plein air pieces for this show. This one is from Gamboa Point.

Painting large scale outdoors is a completely different beast. The wind, the shifting light, the physical effort, the lack of control, all of it gets into the painting.

This year, since turning 50, I’ve made a very conscious choice to paint more directly from life. Last year was the best year of my career, but I still felt a hollow ache inside, as if something essential was missing. Then a switch flipped.

The studio gives comfort, stability, and refinement. But with a finite number of breaths left in my body, I feel a stronger need to spend them out in the world, standing in front of the thing itself.

These recent paintings feel more raw, more honest, more human. They are not just images of places, they are records of being there.

A plein air painting carries the edge of a live performance. It may be flawed, weathered, and imperfect, but it is alive.

Just like us.

Come see the new Big Sur paintings this weekend at Ojai Art in the Park.

Art Shows Coming UpLooking forward to a strong run of spring shows. The Texas shows will hopefully be good this year if ...
04/20/2026

Art Shows Coming Up

Looking forward to a strong run of spring shows. The Texas shows will hopefully be good this year if the weather finally settles down after a wet and stormy run at The Woodlands last weekend.

April 24th, 25th & 26th
Art in the Square
Southlake, Texas
Booth PW2D

May 2nd & 3rd
Cottonwood Art Festival Spring 2026
Richardson, Texas

May 16th & 17th
The Beverly Hills Art Show
California, Booth 341
Always a fantastic weekend, the California weather never seems to fail us there.

May 23rd & 24th
Ojai Art in the Park
California
One of my favorite shows of the year, and a place I ride out to on the motorbike whenever I get the chance.

If you are nearby, come by and say hello.

This 30 x 40 painting was inspired by the poppy fields in the north of France, near a place called Wissant between Calai...
04/12/2026

This 30 x 40 painting was inspired by the poppy fields in the north of France, near a place called Wissant between Calais and Boulogne. It’s somewhere I’ve been returning to for the past 30 years, and it holds deep importance to me and my family.

On this particular trip, I had been painting along the coastline. As I finished that piece, I glanced to my left and caught a tiny flash of red in the far distance. I couldn’t quite make it out, but it stayed with me. The next day I committed the spot to memory, parked up, and hiked in that general direction. After cresting one of the hills along a farm track, I was met with the most dense field of poppies I’ve ever seen.

The landscape in this part of France is still scarred, pockmarked with craters from the Second World War, as if a giant had walked across it. That makes this a bittersweet painting for me. The poppies represent the blood that was spilled during D Day, yet at the same time, the contrast of red against green is so full of life, it truly sings.

With this piece, I spent a lot of time refining the edges, adjusting the chroma and temperature of the poppies, and varying the marks so it feels more organic and alive.

This one means a lot to me.

Hello everyone,This 30 x 40 painting was inspired by a trip to the Grand Canyon on my way back from Colorado. It was bre...
04/11/2026

Hello everyone,

This 30 x 40 painting was inspired by a trip to the Grand Canyon on my way back from Colorado. It was breathtaking, truly something that brought tears to my eyes. The Grand Canyon and Yosemite both have that effect on me.

Wanting to grow as an artist, I spent a good two days just sitting with this piece, refining the chroma, the shapes, and the values. I’m a big fan of that blue violet atmospheric perspective in the distant mountains, and I often push the saturation to celebrate it. This time, though, something had to give to keep the harmony, so I softened and greyed those distant forms.

I also reduced the values in the sky and clouds and spent a full day working on edges, making sure the chromatic shifts moving forward reflected the warmth and coolness of the design. And I resisted the urge to overwork the trees in the foreground, which felt like a small but meaningful step forward for me.

I’m absolutely delighted that this piece found a home in a beautiful house in St. George, Utah last weekend.

This is the second painting from my Telluride trip.Driving into the village, I pulled over under a blanket of overcast s...
04/10/2026

This is the second painting from my Telluride trip.

Driving into the village, I pulled over under a blanket of overcast sky when a sudden beam of sunlight cut across the field, lighting up a band of aspens against mountains sitting quietly in shadow behind. It was one of those fleeting moments you just know is worth chasing.

I spent a lot of time sitting with this one, far more than painting at first, just observing and working out how to make it stronger. I ended up shifting quite a bit from the reference. I pushed the tree line forward, deepened the mountain ridge behind it, and used that contrast, a classic move, to make the aspens really come alive.

Across the rest of the painting, I held back the chroma and kept the tones cooler so the light in the trees could do the work without relying on heavy yellows or oranges that would darken the value. Everything else was designed to support that one moment.

My favorite detail is a very thin band of violet at the base of the trees. It’s almost imperceptible, but it creates a subtle vibration that lifts the brightness and gives the whole passage a sense of energy.

I spent two full days mostly looking, refining, and thinking. That time, more than anything, is where I feel the real growth is happening right now.

I owe a lot of this progression to the insights shared by in his workshops.

Yesterday’s still life was all about discovery, but I think this one came out even better. I just love lemons, or maybe ...
02/20/2026

Yesterday’s still life was all about discovery, but I think this one came out even better. I just love lemons, or maybe more honestly, I love painting lemons. They bring this incredible glow into a painting, full of yellow, orange, and warmth. The reflective light seems to lift everything around them and quietly warm the entire composition.

The pears were fun yesterday, but this setup had more conversation happening across the surface. The oranges reflecting into the wood, the clear bottle catching and bending light in the middle, and the small details inside the white vase all kept revealing little moments as I worked. Those are the paintings you do not want to stop painting.

I can usually tell when something worked, and this one felt finished in a single day, which is always a good sign.

Address

Los Angeles, CA

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Richard J Oliver Art posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category