Helen Richards is a visual artist from Queensland and is best known for her wonderfully stylized colourful paintings of birds, trees and mangroves. After working as a visual arts teacher for many years, she has now launched her career a full-time artist in her home-based studio on her farm at the back of Brisbane in the Lockyer Valley.
She has always been a creative person, starting out as a textile artist (spinning, weaving, dyeing, fabric printmaking and wearable art) with a Diploma of Visual Arts. She then experimented in oil painting before completing a Graduate Diploma in Film and TV. After taking a few workshops, the spontaneous and expressive nature of acrylic and mixed media then became preferred medium of creativity. The textile influence is still evident in her work in the strong sense of texture, pattern and colour that enriches her paintings.
The paintings are heavily influenced by the birds in the beautiful tropical gardens that surrounded her pervious house in Bundaberg and the rural farm surroundings and mountains in her new home. When creating an artwork, Helen says that her canvas fluidly evolves when she embellishes the surface of a canvas with a variety of symbols, shapes, prints, colours textures and shapes. The whimsical narrative evolves by painting out the negative spaces from her design, leaving the birds, flowers and trees with a wonderful spontaneous surface that is then enhanced and highlighted to create a whimsical, colourful landscape. Her artwork invite the viewer to question and respond to the shapes, textures, animals and plants within.