Rosalyn Richards - prints and biography
American Printmaker at the Intersection of Science, Technology, and the Natural World
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: etching and aquatint
Image size: 13.18 × 11.88
Paper size: 23 in. x 19 in.
Edition: 12
Year: 2014
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 8 x 9.88 inches
Edition of 10
Year: 2021
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching and aquatint
Image size: 18 × 11.88 inches
Paper size: 27 in. x 20 inches
Edition: 10
Year: 2021
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 9.75 x 7.75 inches
Edition of 20
Year: 2003
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint on chine colle.
Image Size: 8.5 x 6.75 inches
Paper size: 19 in. x 14 ¾ in.
Edition Size: 15
Year: 2005
Signed, titled, numbered in pencil
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint.
Image Size: 9.75 x 7.75
Signed, titled, numbered.
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint.
Image Size: 13.875 × 11.875 inches
Year: 2025
Edition Size: 12
Signed, titled, numbered.
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching and aquatint
Image : 11.88 x 9.88 inches
Edition: 15
Year: 2011
In Descent, Rosalyn Richards explores gravity, structure, and dissolution through a spare yet complex abstract composition. Layered etching and aquatint form a suspended, funnel-like geometry that appears to pull the surrounding marks inward, suggesting both physical descent and conceptual inquiry. Fine linear scaffolding intersects with atmospheric tonal fields, creating a tension between precision and entropy.
Executed in 2011 in a small edition of 11, this print reflects Richards’s interest in systems, mapping, and the visual language of measurement, while allowing chance textures and tonal drift to disrupt strict order. The result is a work that feels simultaneously analytical and poetic—an image of movement slowed, examined, and quietly unsettled.
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 7.75 x 5.88 inches
Edition of 10
Year: 2018
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 7.88 x 5.75 inches
Edition of 10
Year: 2014
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 11.75 x 17.75 inches
Edition of 10
Year: 2018
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint.
Image Size: 18 × 12 inches
Year: 2026
Edition Size: 10
Signed, titled, numbered.
a layered abstract composition that balances precision and spontaneity. Interlocking geometric forms—circles, triangles, arcs, and linear vectors—float across a softly textured ground, creating a visual field that suggests motion, collapse, and reassembly. Subtle ghosted impressions and granular passages introduce a sense of erosion, as though earlier structures remain faintly embedded beneath the surface.
Richards’s use of muted greens, charcoal blacks, and warm ochre accents establishes a restrained yet dynamic palette. The careful interplay between measured geometry and organic mark-making reflects the artist’s ongoing investigation into systems, instability, and transformation. Lines intersect, fragment, and reorient, evoking architectural diagrams, celestial mapping, or the residue of engineered forms breaking apart over time.
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 11.75 x 9.75 inches
Edition of 10
Year: 2014
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 11.88 x 11.75 inches
Edition of 10
Year: 2015
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image size: 6.8 x 5.8 inches
Edition of 15
Year: 2012
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 11.75 x 9.88 inches
Edition of 15
Year: 2013
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 6.5 x 6 inches
Edition of 10
Year: 2008
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 11.75 x 8 inches
Edition of 15
Year: 2003
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint. Signed, titled, numbered.
Image Size: 5.75 x 4.25
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 10 × 8 inches
Edition of 10
Year: 2022
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 12 × 9 inches
Edition of 10
Year: 2023
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 17.75 x 11.75 inches
Edition of 10
Year: 2017
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint on chine colle. Signed, titled, numbered.
Image Size: 5.75 x 9 in.
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 4.25 x 6.5 inches
Edition of 15
Year: 2009
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 14.875 x 10.875 inches
Edition of 12
Year: 2008
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint. Signed, titled, numbered.
Image Size: 9.75 x 7.75
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint . Signed, titled, numbered.
Image Size: 10.75 x 7.5 in.
Edition Size: 15
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Imagesize: 7 x 6 inches
Edition of 15
Year: 2011
In Continuum, Rosalyn Richards investigates accumulation, repetition, and the persistence of mark-making across time. Interlacing lines, arcs, and circular traces move across the surface like residual diagrams—suggesting measurement systems that have been repeatedly revised, erased, and re-inscribed. The warm tonal palette softens the density of marks, allowing structure and improvisation to coexist.
Executed as an etching and aquatint, the print reflects Richards’s sustained engagement with process and duration, where no single gesture dominates and meaning emerges through layering. Continuum reads less as a fixed image than as a record of ongoing activity—an abstract field shaped by rhythm, return, and gradual transformation.
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 11.75 x 11.75 inches
Edition of 10
Year: 2009
Rosalyn Richards
Biography
Rosalyn Richards is an American artist and educator whose career has spanned more than four decades. She served as a member of the art faculty at Bucknell University from 1982-2014 where she influenced generations of young artists through her teaching while continuing to develop a significant professional practice. Richards has exhibited widely, with solo shows across the United States, and her work is represented in numerous museum collections, reflecting her standing as a respected figure in contemporary printmaking and painting.
Richards’s artistic vision is deeply shaped by the intersection of science, technology, and the natural world. Drawing inspiration from images produced in particle physics, biotechnology, radiology, satellite photography, and geological surveys, her work explores how human perception of nature is mediated by technology. Her paintings, prints, and drawings often highlight the tension between direct sensory experiences of the natural environment and the abstracted, systematized images created through technological means.
One of Richards’s central strategies is her engagement with the visual language of maps, charts, and diagrams. In many works, she deconstructs these forms, reconstructing them into imaginary maps that function as metaphors for both inner journeys and imaginative exploration. While maps traditionally serve practical and serious functions, Richards reinterprets them playfully, weaving in elements of games and puzzles. In doing so, she opens space for whimsy within otherwise rigid systems, transforming tools of measurement and control into pathways of discovery and creativity. Her work resonates with the human impulse to create order and microcosms within the vast and unpredictable universe.
Richards’s art has been widely collected by prestigious institutions. Museum collections that include her work are the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at UCLA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, among many others.
Through her career as both artist and educator, Rosalyn Richards has cultivated a practice that bridges art and science, rigor and play, order and imagination. Her works invite viewers to reconsider how we understand and map the world around us—and within us—reminding us that creativity is both a system of exploration and a journey of wonder.
Related artists working with structure, systems, and abstraction in printmaking:
Elise Wagner
Seiko Tachibana
Renaud Allirand
Mario Teleri Biason
By: Rosalyn Richards
Medium: Etching with aquatint
Image: 11.88 x 5.88 inches
Edition of 15
Year: 2013