BIOGRAPHY
Rick J. Delanty is an award-winning plein air and studio painter, with a decades-long passion for bringing the landscape to life on canvas. Employing oil and acrylic pigments to board and canvas, while creating landscape forms from energetic, inspired brushstrokes, Delanty invites the viewer to consider with him the power and beauty of land and sea.
Born in northern California in 1951, the artist has been a long-time painter of California land- and seascapes. An exuberant calligraphy is the hallmark of Delanty’s style. The artist describes it as an “expressionistic realism,” which might evoke the California Coast, mountains, streams, or backcountry. In his San Clemente studio, Rick has created art both in the studio and plein air for over four decades. With the moods of nature as his inspiration, the artist explores the relationship between art, Creation, and the human spirit in his boldly-brushed oil and acrylic paintings. Plein air painting plays an important role in achieving authenticity and realism in the artist’s work.
Educated at the University of California in literature and painting, Delanty came to San Clemente in 1974 as an arts instructor at San Clemente High School, where he taught drawing and painting for 32 years. Delanty watercolors were featured at the Laguna Beach Festival of the Arts between 1985-90, and his acrylics in 2012. Since 1995, Rick’s chosen mediums have been acrylic paint for larger studio works, and oils for plein air work. The artist is a Signature member of the American Impressionist Society, the Laguna Plein Air Painters Association, the International Society of Acrylic Painters, Plein Air Artists of Colorado.and California Plein Air Painters (CPAP), as well as Artist member of the California Art Club, and the Salmagundi Club.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Intuition and spontaneity play key roles in the development of Rick’s landscape paintings. Expressive brushwork conveys his emotional response to that landscape, in his search to describe the “essence” behind the “form.” Acrylics and oils are Rick’s chosen mediums, for their color, liquidity, versatility, and longevity. Subjects selected for painting are images that, to him, reflect truth, beauty, power, and life. Compositional structure and color symbolism are his focus in creating a simplified order from the complexity of nature, from God’s Creation. As Rick paints, he seeks the supernatural as it is partially revealed in the visible world: He is painting the Spirit in nature.
