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RK Mills is a painter, printmaker and environmental artist.
Rick was a faculty member at Pratt and Professor of art at LIU/Post for 28 years where he taught painting, pintmaking and papermaking.
In addition to being an image maker, his past work involved an aesthetic that reconnected people to place, especially degraded urban wetland landscapes. His place based eco-art and public art work included environmental and cultural history research, interpretation, graphics, landscape design collaboration, education and community engagement. Rick was one of the original creators of the Teaneck Creek Conservancy, serving as first Project Director then as artist-in-residence for six years.
“As a landscape artist living in the most densely developed region of the most densely populated state in the US, where open space and wetlands have historically been targeted for draining, filling, dumping and paving it’s a wonder it took as long as it did for my work to shift into ‘crisis mode’ and to consider myself an environmental artist. The connections to community that I intuitively start with are always about a sense of place (can the landscape paintings of my mid-western great grandmother explain this?)
I have at various times narrated, interpreted, represented, (re)designed and abstracted the landscape. After fourteen years of collaborative public work I have returned to painting, working from the everyday, familiar places around me, seeking to create images that are at once subtle and iconic. I hope that the years of revealing the often hidden cultural and environmental history of place informs my recent work; reflecting a deeper feeling for layers of landscape and memory. Ultimately, I am trying to make good paintings from my experience.
Mills has exhibited in New York and internationally.
Permanent public artworks have been installed in Newark, Morris Plains, New Gretna and Teaneck, New Jersey.
He is represented by Blue Mountain Gallery in NYC and Longyear Gallery in Margaretville, NY.
See: www.richardkirkmills.net