Artist : Richelle Cripe
Instagram: @richellecripe
Etsy Shop: etsy.com/shop/RichelleCripe
Website: richellecripe.com
My subjects come from filtering the environment to find spaces where nature and man-made systems collide. I explore ideas through the process of painting and mark-marking, where each piece holds equal weight regardless of size or materials. -Richelle Cripe
Q&A
Tell me about yourself?
Hi, I’m Richelle, a painter and software engineer living in Boulder, Colorado. I studied fine art and art history at the University of Kentucky, and information science at the University of Colorado before finally ending up as a full-time computer programmer and part-time artist. :)
I grew up in West Virginia and spent most of my time reading, making crafts, and playing outside in the woods. I moved to Colorado ten years ago and am loving it here! Needless to say, I feel most at home in the mountains.
When I’m not writing code or making art, I enjoy playing the piano, baking, hiking, live music, trying new foods, and travel of any kind.
Where do you find inspiration?
I find inspiration almost everywhere- landscapes being my most obvious inspiration currently, but I also notice random color combinations, shadows, shapes, anything around me… truly anything in the natural or built environment could inspire me! I’m also very influenced by whatever I’m reading; lately I’ve been delving into writing from Oliver Sacks, Joseph Campbell, Frank Stella and Wassily Kandinsky. My biggest influences in terms of art movements/types of art are: children’s drawings, the arts and crafts movement, abstract expressionism, quilts, embroidery patterns, Indian miniatures, botanical illustration, and dioramas.
What is your biggest challenge?
My biggest challenge (in life, not just in painting) is focusing on one thing at a time. I have always been a person who ping-pongs around because I find so many things interesting, it’s really hard for me to focus on doing one thing and doing it well. For example, in college I was trying to study music, architecture, dance and geology alongside my double major in Fine Art and Art History, and I took tons of classes that had no effect on my graduation date just because I wanted to learn… which caused me to graduate much later than I was supposed to! Even now, I’m in a career that I truly enjoy, but it’s still difficult for me to focus on that every day because there are so many other things I want to learn about. If ‘professional student’ was a thing you could get paid for, I would do that!
What is your dream project?
My dream project is to make a series of very large-scale paintings influenced by museum dioramas and have them displayed at either the Field Museum in Chicago or the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco (I would also be thrilled to hang them at Denver Museum of Nature and Science).
If you had a choice between two superpowers, being invisible or flying, which would you choose and why?
Definitely flying! I love to fly, being a pilot was my first dream job as a kid and one of my life goals is to get a pilot’s license.
