Island artist Richard Limber wasn’t sure how his current exhibition of portraits, titled A Bunch of Faces for You, would play at the West Tisbury Library. Fitting in artistically was not the concern. With his edgy, ripped-from-the-headlines aesthetic, Mr. Limber has positioned himself as an outsider in an Island art scene he views as dominated by nostalgia.
“There has to be self-examination and the arts are not doing it,” he told the Gazette last week. “I see a lot of limitations and I try to push those limitations.”
What initially challenged Mr. Limber in West Tisbury was the exhibition room, lined with windows to the library’s landscaped exterior and parking lot.
“I wasn’t sure if it would work,” he said.
But Mr. Limber wound up making the apertures an asset, by treating his portraits as windows of their own—inhabited by faces.
“To me, they’re looking in on you,” he said of the images he hung between the window frames.
About two-thirds of the portraits in A Bunch of Faces for You are drawn from life, Mr. Limber said. They include numerous female heads, as well as that of Island chef Gavin Smith, and a nude or two. The rest are faces that have caught his eye in the news. These generally fall into two categories: men in power and women who have survived, or fallen victim to, the power of men.
Working in ink, Mr. Limber creates his pieces in stages, drawing, printing and then drawing on the giclée prints to achieve dynamic, arresting portraits.
His Rupert Murdoch, from 2017, fairly bristles with bland malevolence, while a series titled Mother and Child contrasts the Madonna-like image of a migrant mother cradling her infant with Mr. Limber’s hand-drawn facsimile of a newspaper headline reading: “Immigrants Keep Crossing Borders, Undeterred by Washington’s Whims.”
One of his most provocative portraits is Nadia (2017), from a newspaper story about New York murder victim Nadia Saavedra.
In Mr. Limber’s drawing, taken from a snapshot of Ms. Saavedra in life, she gazes forth from beneath a blotted New York Times masthead. Around her face read words from the article chronicling her death, at the hands of her husband, on her 34th birthday.
A trained artist whose early studies included drawing cadavers in community college, Mr. Limber is also an innovator who has worked in film and music as well as drawing and painting, and occasionally employs mixed media, like the artificial rose he added to his portrait of Ms. Saavedra.
He has also been experimenting with interactive backlighting, equipping some pieces with buttons that raise or lower the light.
“I’m playing with the original work,” he said.
A Bunch of Faces for You is on display at the West Tisbury library through Friday. To find out more about Mr. Limber’s art, visit richardlimber.com.
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