Richard Hall was introduced to the visual arts in the later 1960’s at the Baltimore Museum of Art where he was entranced by the Cone Collection and Henri Matisse while an undergraduate in Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University. He first took up a camera with serious intent while an Engineering graduate student in Evanston, Ill in 1971 – working at first exclusively with black and white film. During this period he also worked on life drawing, silk printing and painting with acrylics. Later in Pittsburgh, PA, while on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh, he switched to color film predominantly and continued with this format upon arriving in Kent County, MD in 2005, where he currently resides and enjoys his retirement from academia. He finally “went digital” in early 2008 and since then has worked both traditionally in black and white and color and with some image manipulation. He first showed his photographic work professionally in the fall of 2007 in Chestertown, MD. Since then he has shown widely in galleries and other venues on the Delmarva Peninsula, Annapolis, Fredericksburg and Harrisonburg VA, Washington, DC, Frederick, MD and Brooklyn, NY in group shows (typically juried all-mediums shows) and one- or two- person shows. Most recently he has shown in juried group shows at the Mispillion Art League (Milford, DE), The Fredericksburg Center for the Creative Arts (Fredericksburg, VA), the Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community (Harrisonburg, VA) and the Maryland Federation of Art Watering Holes online exhibit; and in an invited group show and fundraiser Bare the Walls -2 at the Foundry Gallery (Washington, DC). He gains inspiration and encouragement from a large number of contemporary artists in various mediums in the middle-Atlantic region.

Hall is hard-pressed to claim a single theme for his work – he loves portals and looking through them, doors and windows, strangely lit interior spaces and other architectural detail, country churches, lonely houses on flatlands, interesting compositions in nature often intermingled with the works of man, dishabille in all its manifestations, abstraction in nature, …… In any case he strives to create well-composed images with interesting values in light and color, a sense of space and hopefully with a “story” or mood. He tends to work in the outdoors with available light and when he finds himself indoors looks for views to the outside or indoor scenes lit with natural light. In his one-man show, Rural Images, (November 2015, Chestertown, MD) he focused on the works of man as they interact in rural landscapes. He is currently working on a small town theme.

Hall has been a show organizer and curator with the Chestertown Arts League and Chestertown RiverArts and a member of the Chesapeake College Art Advisory Committee. He is currently a member of the Maryland Federation of Art (MFA) and the Mispillion Art League. Before retirement he was on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in Electrical and Computer Engineering with research interests in Image Processing Algorithms and Digital Topology. Contact Hall for email updates on his work and for notification of completion of his website, in development: Richard Hall Mail: PO Box 14, 12128 Galena Road, Massey, MD 21650. Email: rwhall@pitt.edu Tele: 410-928-5012 The images shown in the portfolio reflect a range of the artist's interests. The sizes shown are the typical image size when shown in gallery shows -- when framed most of these images use a 16x19 frame size.