Rick Chapman: Circle

Rick Chapman’s bold visual sensibility makes it easy to see the threads connecting his Circle, Tree and Isolate series along with his portraiture work. A careful sense of design, intimacy, and texture emanate from all of Chapman’s images. In the best of romantic traditions, his photographic work has been a personal journey of discovery, revealing Nature’s inherent harmony and unveiling larger truths.

– Rick Chapman

Chapman’s long-time obsession with searching rivers, creeks and ocean shorelines for spherical rocks was a first indicator of his interest in the universal truths symbolically held within the perfect shape. Contemplating circle themes found in most world religions’ iconography, the structures of plant life and architecture, the micro of the atom and the macro of the solar system Chapman has raised his sensitivity to what is remarkable about the mundane circles and spheres encountered in everyday life. Striving to root his art in the everyday, Chapman traditionally photographs circular objects in locations as mundane as elevators, barnyards, city streets and public parks. Whether the objects are found in urban centers or rural landscapes, his intention is to explore the universal truths they represent. Sizing every printed circle to the same diameter, they become virtual letters of a lost alphabet, together communicating a language that transcends the original objects themselves.

Chapman’s work is held in many collections throughout the United States including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the LA County Museum, George Eastman House, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, The GAP Corporation, Genentech and the private collection of Sir Elton John. Gallery representation: Dolby Chadwick in San Francisco, Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles, ClampArt Gallery in New York, and the Young Gallery in Brussels Belgium.