Interview with Lisa Rickard
Lisa Rickard’s artistic practice is rooted in Imaginative Realism, a language in which the human figure becomes a symbolic vessel for expressing invisible realities. Her paintings often begin with abstract ideas developed through graphite drawing, before evolving into luminous compositions where light appears to move, breathe, and dance across the human form.
Born in Philadelphia, Rickard discovered her fascination with the allegorical figure during her teenage years, when she began drawing regularly from a live nude model who was also a ballet dancer. This early experience shaped her sensitivity to movement, gesture, and the expressive potential of the body.
She studied at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and later earned her BFA in Graphic Design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. This was followed by more than two decades as a commercial artist, first within an advertising agency and later in the marketing department of a global corporation.
Her professional background gave her a strong sense of composition, visual structure, and conceptual clarity.
In a later stage of her career, Rickard deepened her commitment to figurative painting through mentorship with several oil painters specializing in Classical Realism. Her understanding of the human form has also been enriched by her experience as a dancer and dance instructor, allowing her to approach the body not only as a subject, but as a living expression of emotion, movement, and inner meaning.
For Rickard, the human figure is a way to make the invisible visible. Her work explores allegory as a visual language capable of revealing universal emotions, psychological states, and abstract concepts. Through the beauty and complexity of the human form, she gives presence to ideas such as time, freedom, transformation, and the silent dimensions of the inner world.
We begin May with Lisa Rickard on the cover of The Guide Artists, an artist who brings together the tradition of classical painting with a deeply personal vision. Her work builds a visual language in which symbolism is no longer merely an aesthetic element, but becomes an emotional, poetic, and spiritual experience.
In her paintings, Lisa Rickard takes wings beyond the decorative or narrative. She transforms them into an open reflection on freedom. Traditionally associated with the divine, wings have represented elevation, purity, and the unreachable, but also distance, renunciation, and the tension between two worlds. The artist recovers this imagery and reinterprets it through an intimate sensibility, where the spiritual and the human coexist within the same territory of beauty, silence, and uncertainty.
DISCOVER MORE… THE GUIDE ARTISTS MAGAZINE ISSUE 89
