Rick Shaefer

Shaefer began his career as a photographer before turning increasingly to painting and drawing in the early 1990s. His background in photography, particularly his attention to tonal range and the depth of black-and-white printing, continues to inform the dramatic contrasts and nuanced grays of his charcoal and graphite works.

He holds degrees from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Shaefer is a two-time recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and has received multiple grants and fellowship awards from the Connecticut Office of the Arts. His work is held in public and private collections and has been discussed in publications including ARTnews. He lives and works in Connecticut.

Line is central to Rick Shaefer’s practice. Working primarily in charcoal, graphite, and ink, he builds images through accumulations of fluid, gestural marks rather than blending or smudging the medium. At close range, the drawings reveal an almost calligraphic vocabulary of loops, strokes, punctuations, and dense passages of line. From a distance, these individual marks coalesce into highly resolved images with a striking sense of depth, volume, and weight.

The physical scale of the drawings is integral to their making. Shaefer often works at or near life size, allowing the act of drawing to become increasingly gestural and intuitive. Dense areas of information give way to quieter passages, creating a rhythm across the surface that can resemble both writing and mapping. Although the works suggest extraordinary detail, their realism is constructed through an economy of marks rather than a photorealist transcription of the subject.

Shaefer is particularly drawn to forms in the natural world that carry both physical and symbolic weight: fallen trees, dense forests, flowers, animals, icebergs, and other subjects whose surfaces offer a rich variety of texture. Trees in particular have become recurring forms, their massive trunks, scars, knots, and decay suggesting bodily or anthropomorphic qualities. Presented at an imposing scale, they can take on a totemic presence while invoking the long history of mythology and symbolism surrounding the natural world.

His cloud paintings provide a more atmospheric counterpoint to the precision of the drawings. Built through loose brushwork, broad passages of paint, and glazing, they allow the material itself to remain visible within the image. Shaefer is interested in the contradiction inherent in clouds: their fleeting and immaterial nature set against the extraordinary sense of mass, structure, and sculptural presence they can assume.

Across both drawing and painting, Shaefer balances observation with gesture. His work moves continuously between abstraction and representation—the physical immediacy of an individual mark and the larger image that emerges as the viewer steps away.