Art exhibit review: UCLA alumnus Richard Wyatt Jr. uses art to encapsulate emotion and resilience
UCLA Department of Art alumnus Richard Wyatt Jr.’s latest drawings are surprising pictures of hope and healing.
Wyatt’s “The Gifted One” displays late basketball player Kobe Bryant with charcoal on paper. (Finn Chitwood/Daily Bruin) The eight charcoal, graphite and pencil on paper drawings in “Loss, Healing & Restoration” are placed inside and outside the second of three rooms at Steve Turner gallery in West Hollywood. The show is intimate – Wyatt delicately renders portraits of family, himself and Bryant, as well as two drawings that reference St. Paul the Apostle. In “Loss, Healing & Restoration,” the artist draws the emotional gamut of pain and recovery, offering an ode to resilience.
Considering his oeuvre of iconic public works, it is hard to picture Wyatt as an undergraduate art student at UCLA in 1978 – that he walked through the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, studied on North Campus and was as young and zealous as current-day art students. Growing up, Wyatt studied at the Watts Towers Art Center, where he later painted a mural of Cecil Ferguson, and at age 17, he displayed work in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “A Panorama of Black Artists” exhibition. With 50 years of practice behind him, Wyatt is at the peak of his technical abilities in “Loss, Healing & Restoration.”
Wyatt pulls viewers into the gallery room with three large drawings. “Glory Cloud,” the full-body drawing of Wyatt’s father, looks straight ahead with thunderous authority as the largest drawing in the show. Works to the left and right – “Joyce,” a portrait of Wyatt’s wife that fixates viewers with its complex emotion, and “The Gifted One,” a portrait of late basketball star Bryant, perhaps the most moving in the show – attract viewers with their graphic sharpness.
“Loss, Healing & Restoration” is so artistically successful because Wyatt’s techniques and materials are perfectly aligned with his figurative and thematic content. It is a show about humble persistence. Wyatt’s father stands with his right hand clenched; his wife’s face is tightened by a pursed mouth. “The Gifted One” assumes a slight snarl and St. Paul works toward his story of redemption. The work is made with commonplace pencil, graphite and elemental charcoal, with evidently painstaking concentration and dedication.
As the show’s title suggests, these eight works offer a fulfilling emotional arc of healing from tragedy. Even the eyelashes on “The Gifted One” are heartbreaking as reminders of humanness and fragility as well as heartwarming details of Wyatt’s maximum tenderness. The gallery is satisfying, which may not be a virtue for viewers who want subversion, incisiveness or abstract chaos.
But for those who need expertly rendered, thoughtful drawings of resilience, “Loss, Healing & Restoration” is the show to start off 2022. — David Egan, Jan. 18, 2022
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Daily Bruin website.
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