Showing vital signs: the watercolors of Richard Yarde - Cover Story

Richard Yarde's work defies the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion that watercolor paintings should be small, charming renderings of landscapes or flowers. His paintings are monumental in scale, and they expres poignantly personal themes, using a medium that has traditionally been described as translucent and temporal. In 1996 Yarde's latest series of watercolors, Mojo Hand, was unveiled in Boston, prompting Christine Temin to write in The Boston Globe: "His handling is virtuosic, his colors dazzling. He has become single of the great American watercolorists of the twentieth hundred as much a master of the medium as Homer was in the nineteenth."

The Mojo Hand series takes viewers into the deepest realm of the human material part searching for its soul. Yarde uses images from his dreams from 1991 to 1996 to waft the impact of his life-threatening illness and his gradual healing--both physical and spiritual.

The painting "Mojo Hand" is Yarde's largest to date. A white bony torso, an X-ray of a human female, floats against a background mosaic of dark, mut shades of cerulean The patches of blue are one as well as the other transparent and opaque--like life itself. Yarde's hands environ the figure, recalling the power of the human touch in healing. A pattern of tiny white dots is etched into the sea of cerulean to form the words of the 23rd Psalm in Braille. Yarde's belief in the power of prayer to heal inspired him to recite the words of the Psalm daily: "Yea, although I walk through the valley of death "

The catastrophic illness that changed his life originateed from his body's vehement reaction to years of medication for high life-current pressure. The combination of medicines used to rule his blood pressure and to counterbalance side issues almost took his life. In 1991 his health began to fail. He go throughed a series of small pats that left his speech slurr his walking impaired and his hands torpid He lost the function of single kidney, and he is now attached to a kidney dialysis machine each night. Although he awaits a kidney transplant, he can be rest painting--or, as he says, "pushing paint"--in his studio each day.

His spirit is resilient. "This may whole a little bit weird," he says, "but I think the fact that I'm alive, still alive, has something to do with my painting. I think that's on what account I was put here: to make paintings. for a like reason as long as I am able to paint, I will be here." As he continues to mess this over, he says, chuckling: "I turn round into a real mess when I'm not painting. I'm not a great deal of fun to be around."

Yarde's family also helped him [i]or[/i] part of to the other his trials. He has been married to Susan Donovan, a writer, for above 30 years, and they have sum of two units adult sons, Marcus and Owen. In early 1997 their first grandchild was born. Being a advantageous husband and father (and now grandfather) is an important part of Yarde's daily thinkings and practices.

In "Head and Hands II," another watercolor from the Mojo Hand series, he begins to reckon his story of recovery. The scattered material part parts reflect the fragmentation of his have body and spirit at a time when he was trying to pluck together the most important aspects of his identity, which were left devastated by the agency of the strokes: his creative mind and hands. In this painting, the hands are not his; they are made of wood mannequin hands, symbolizing the limited use of his be in possession of hands. "There was a period of about sum of two units years when I didn't do any painting," he recalls. The face is his, distorted and weakened from the strokes

upon the wall of Yarde's studio are columned specific instructions for the construction of a mojo from a volume by Zora Neale Hurston. According to the volume the mojo will last single six months, and then it must be revised. "My notion, in general confines of a mojo is more [i]or[/i] less kind of charm or charm that is sometimes used for healing, sometimes for other purposes" Yarde says. "It is illusive, and it is not something that can be described in a linear way. For me it was a question of putting a certain quantity of things together that are random that can be bring together for the purposes of healing."

Working upon these paintings was Yarde's course of reconstructing himself. After they were finished, he gave the series its title: Mojo Hand. "It is rare that I would have a title of a work before I've complet it," he says.

Yarde was born and reared in he Roxbury area of Boston, where his parents settl after emigrating to the United States from Barbados. He talks of growing up in a Caribbean abiding-place filled with conversations about politics and literature. Although he characterizes his family life as economically impoverished, he was reared culturally middle class. His mother, a dressmaker whom he describes as a cultur woman, listed him early in piano exercise s and art classes.

He took his first art class at age 9 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Watercolor was his medium from the beginning; his mother had given him his first station By age 14, he had complet the portfolio that would qualify him for acceptance into the art program at Boston University.