"50 Years: A Commemorative Painting" 28" x 22" Acrylic on Stretched Canvas
		Robert Richard is a part-time artist specializing in portraiture but he takes his “hobby” very seriously.  Starting with pencil drawings and oil paintings, this award-winning artist has more recently added coloured pencil and acrylic paintings to his repertoire.  Artists like Michelangelo and Norman Rockwell inspire him with their attention to detail combined with the visual narrative of a storyteller.  In fact, he paid homage by using his own collection of Norman Rockwell books as a reference for the stack of books marking the location of the public library. With this fifty-year commemorative painting, artist and subject are well suited to each other.  Born in Toronto, Robert lived in Richmond Hill for most of his youth.  He was a student at Charles Howitt Public School but what’s more, he lived on one of the streets just behind the school for more than a decade. The painting is filled with contrast.  The most obvious is past and present but there are many others that are not so obvious.  Although it’s divided into two seemingly separate halves, in the painting, as in life, the past and the present are interconnected.