Giddy Richt, T. Walker, Professional Trailrider, colored pencil, 18 x 18.
With every portrait she creates, Giddy Richt strives to capture both a likeness and the very essence of the person she’s portraying. Naturally, that was the artist’s primary goal when she completed her winning entry: a realistic portrait of her neighbor T. Walker, intricately rendered in colored pencil. “He is a true cowboy,” Richt says of her drawing’s star, who begrudgingly tolerated her camera one evening as she snapped multiple photographs of him outside their rural Tennessee homes. “I was trying to get that look he has when he’s a little perturbed,” she chuckles. Searching through her photos later, she found the perfect reference shot. “I thought, ‘That’s it—that’s him,’” she says.
For her drawing, which she completed about a year ago, Richt selected an absorbent matte paper so that she could render the finest details in Walker’s features. These days, however, the artist is less interested in hyperrealism. Now she works on canvas surfaces in a looser drawing style. “I’m finding that by using mineral spirits and paintbrushes, I can push [the medium] around and get a more painterly look,” she says. “I’m just trying to see how far I can push the pencils.”
Richt, a former professional muralist, spends seven days a week in her studio, honing her colored-pencil skills and studying the work of both oil painters and colored-pencil artists for guidance. “There’s some phenomenal stuff being done with colored pencils,” she says. “The tools are top-grade, lightfast, and as resilient as oils. So that’s part of my goal: to get people to look at colored pencils as more than just a coloring-book tool.”
Find Richt’s work at www.facebook.com/giddyartssaltaire and www.instagram.com/giddyricht_art.
This story appeared in the December 2020/January 2021 issue of Southwest Art magazine.