Richard Yarde

Richard Yarde (1939–2011) was an American artist who specialized in watercolor painting.^[1] He worked on oil paintings, then switched to watercolors in 1977 and received almost immediate critical acclaim for his works that drew upon themes of African-American history, Yarde's own family history, and his struggle with kidney failure and strokes.^[2]

Yarde taught art at Boston University, Wellesley College, Amherst College, the Massachusetts College of Art, Mount Holyoke College, the University of Massachusetts at Boston. From 1990-2011, he was a professor of art at University of Massachusetts at Amherst.^[3]

Yarde often improvised, sometimes while listening to jazz. Several of his works were unusually large for a watercolorist, 10 by 10 feet or larger. His work defies the fact that watercolor paintings should be small, charming renderings of landscapes or flowers. Yarde's paintings are monumental in scale that express poignant personal themes, he expressed these themes using a medium that has traditionally been described as translucent and temporal. ^[4]

Richard Yarde's parents were immigrants. His father worked as a machinist and his mother was a seamstress. He recalled this as a source of inspiration, saying “There were patterns everywhere."^[3] Healing was a recurring theme in his works and he drew on the images from his own x-ray scans.^[1]

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