God Save Me from Monsters 
Lenticular Hologram, 8 x 10"

Primeval Times
Four-color etching, 5 x 4"

• GOING UNDERGROUND, 4^th annual juried competition and exhibition
  At Art at Large Gallery in NYC, June 2006
• LOVE LETTER INVITATIONAL, a group show with "love" as the theme At Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville VA, June- Aug 2006
• 2006 SEATTLE EROTIC ART FESTIVAL, an annual erotic art show and festival
  At Consolidated Works in Seattle WA, March 24- 26, 2006
• INSIDE/ OUTSIDE, a show of five artists
  At Piedmont Virginia Community College, Jan- Feb 2006
• BRONTOSAURUS, a show of dinosaur-themed artwork by Russell U. Richards, Tim Biskup, Bwana Spoons, and APAK.
  At Just Be Design/Compound Gallery in Portland OR, March 2005
• FIFTY YEARS OF GODZILLA, a group show of more than forty artists
  celebrating the birthday of Godzilla. At Super-7 Store and Gallery
  in San Francisco CA, November 2004
• 2: TWO YEARS, a solo show of etchings, lithographs, toys, and masks
  At McGuffey Art Center, September 2004
• BEYOND WORDS: KATHE KOLLWITZ & CONTEMPORARY PRINT ARTISTS, a group show at the Portsmouth Museums in Portsmouth VA, February and March 2003.
• THE ISLE OF THE LIVING, a solo show of lithographs, etchings, and sculpture
  At McGuffey Art Center, October 2002
• CITY SERIES, a solo show of lithographs and etchings
  At Washington Printmakers' Gallery, February 2002
• MYSTERY EXHIBITION, a solo show of lithographs and etchings
  At McGuffey Art Center, June 2001
• WASTELAND, a show of etchings, collagraphs and drawings by RUR
  Part of the New Members Exhibition at McGuffey Art Center, Jan 2001
• WD PRINTMAKING WORKSHOP EXHIBITION,
  a show of prints by the artists of WD Printmaking Workshop
  At Brandywine Art Center, Philadelphia PA, Feb- March 2001
• THE INHABITANTS, a puppet play by Russell U Richards
  Performed at LIVE ARTS Theater in Charlottesville VA, Sept- Oct 2000
• THE OBLIVIANS, a show of etchings, paintings, and pastels by RUR
  At Weston Gallery in Cambridge MA, March 2000
• THE ELEVENTH HOUR, the prints of Russell U. Richards
  At the Washington Printmakers’ Gallery, Washington DC, Sept 1999

Although seemingly innocent at first glance, Richards’ work offers an adult view of worlds replete with violence and sex, as well as love and pleasure. The works on paper also display his mastery of painstakingly precise printmaking techniques—easy to miss under the intentional naiveté.

With echoes of illustrator Edward Gorey’s macabre humor (and beasties!), M.C. Escher’s attention to composition (and beasties!), and Picasso’s use of figurative line (and beasties!), Richards’ two-dimensional fantasies map out—literally, in the case of his wall of  “Inaccurate Maps of Charlottesville”—new territory. His lithographed hometown street guides sprawl across the page, annotated with Richards’ personal geography, e.g. “Me and Dad 1976” here or “Learned to drive” there.

Elsewhere, jagged-toothed monsters and prehistoric beasts wreak havoc in Richards’ stylized, flat images. But the chomping and destructo-action always have an innocuous “Oh nooooooo!” quality to them, reminiscent of Saturday Night Live’s Mr. Bill.

In “Combat!” a four-color etching from Richards’ recent “Primeval Times” series, a green-yellow flying beast digs its trident-like talon into the purple-winged mossy body of razor-beaked bird, as a swarm of wasp-like insects sting from above and a gator waits open-mouthed below. Yet all this violence is sweetly cartoon-ish, subsumed by the overall puzzle-piece fit of the elements.

Nearby, “The Monster that Swallowed the Night,” a black and white etching, exhibits a similar charm with regard to its graphic sexual content. Here a galumphing creature slurps down the last star-laden bits of darkness while in its belly two lovers orbit and intertwine, oblivious to having been swallowed.

Richards’ inner boy also ventures into three-dimensional creations with papier-maché monster masks and cast plastic-toys. “Little Devil,” a sparkly red figure with white teeth and eyes, stands on a pedestal with the mold Richards used to create it and its shrink-wrapped box featuring a linocut illustration. The artist’s “Li’lzilla,” a minty green miniature of the movie monster that comes with its own peach-colored tower to attack, was recently featured in Super7, a Japanese magazine devoted to toy culture.

Richards’ work retains the quality of what a sixth-grader might sketch in the margins of his notebook as he daydreams out the school window, but on a more subtle level, it reflects the artist’s mature sense of space, color, and humor."

Mostly gone are Richard’s absurd and dark images and his depravity. Entirely gone are the ragged lawns strewn with needles and empty beer bottles, the emaciated dogs, the sagging apartment buildings, and the bullet-shaped heads and sinister/blank smiles of idle, blunt people brimming with a nihilism unleavened with philosophy. In the Isle, children are out playing in bright, grassy, tree-covered spaces. There are horses and sand castles. The sun has risen in Richard’s world, which has suddenly turned bucolic, and its just about the most surprising countrification since Ray Charles embraced the twang.

Lovers gets right down to it. Here are Richard’s naked and pose-able, rubber limbed and naked lovers. He’s arranged them, coupled, in such a way that they look like they’re in a display case, like a butterfly with a pin through the abdomen. But without the bare light bulbs and dirty environs (they couple in white space), the sex is not nearly as raw, not nearly so animal. Its actually almost nice. The title piece from the exhibit, Isle of the Living, doubles the sunshine, as it depicts an island that looks like a fine place to live. There are orchards (with people copulating in them), giant birds, animals, more happy naked men, and even a rock wall to climb. Its arranged in Richard’s familiar stacked and paneled perspective and its cluttered as all get out (in a good way), but nobody is being eaten here, and that’s also a bit of a departure.

Not to say that Richards has purged all the bile from his system. There are two pieces hung at the end of the hallway in which a bit of the old, cartoonishly misanthropic Richards survives. Japanese Monster Movie! packs in about all the grotesque creatures missing from the rest of the exhibit, all floating in this vertiginous arrangement, like solar systems in a galaxy. And then, in Monsters, the sky is nicely busy with bird and insect-like creatures; one has snagged and is carrying off a naked man. Here’s hoping he gets eaten."

Cville Weekly's Aaron Steinberg wrote this of MYSTERY EXHIBITION in an article titled NOT- SO- SUNNY- DAYS:

"...Richards' perspectives aren't three- dimensional or flat so much as spattered, as if he'd sketched something on a tomato and then threw it against a wall. Over this warped template, Richards renders his unflinchingly misanthropic scenes. Hedonism and boredom are a familiar sight in his etchings, drawings, paintings, and sculptures, which come packed with ugly, blunt- headed people having sex, drinking, peeing, passing out, or going nowhere in particular. His figured sport ugly, R2D2- shaped heads, vacant stares, wide- mouth grins, and hippopotamus teeth. His women all have either A) torpedo boobs or B) saggy- flap boobs; his dogs are all disturbingly skinny with red- stained jowls; and his grass patches are strewn with syringes and paper bags.

Richards' work draws on and parodies the thuggish back alleys and bare- light- bulbed spaces of a city; around his idle, self- absorbed people, highways twist and flip, skyscrapers wave, and apartment walls sigh and slump. If all this sounds depressing and unpleasant, it is, but Richards manages to make his urban nihilist vision a funny one as well..."

Boston's Weekly Dig art columnist Anne Weeks had this to say about THE OBLIVIANS:

 "...Richards creates playful cartoon scenarios using pencil, color etching, or oil pastel, filled in with industrial urban backdrops. His characters often occupy the bottom forefront of the landscape and appear silly or slightly innocuous. At further glance, the viewer finds that the characters are something more than just cartoon filler. Their attitude communicates a deft alternative nature: mutant, seedy, slightly aberrant and inorganic. The body forms are painfully geometric with a purposeful lack of symmetry. It is not that the forms are made to look simple but rather that they are rendered bare and stylized to indicate some obtuse affliction or other wrongness in life... 

Richards's use of line defines each individual object, tending to be rough, emulating activity or slight animation as if the whole composition is quaking with unrest. Much of his work appears in somber color, the kind of dead tone you might see on the side of New York City tenements that have been bruised with the city's polluted air..."

Margaret Adams Parker wrote this review of my show THE ELEVENTH HOUR, published in the Summer 1999 issue of Journal of the Print World:

"...As with all of Russell Richards' etchings, Thugs draws the viewer into a vision of urban chaos and offers a powerful protest tinged with edgy humor. His streets are populated with derelicts, thugs, and prostitutes: an exaggerated, multi- colored, often cartoonish cast of characters who grin, grimace, and posture threateningly. They play out the sordid drama and despair of their lives in front of sleek office high rises or run down tenement buildings...The images themselves are sometimes violent, often disturbing, always thought- provoking. In Watching TV, a man sits with his hairy legs stretched out in front of him, eyes glazed, beer bottle in one hand as an odalisque reclines inside the tube... In Rush Hour! a two- plate etching in blue- black and white, figures stare out the window at stalled cars while pollution- rendered in scratchy lines of white ink- pours from their exhaust pipes.

...Richards acknowledges his admiration for such diverse artists as Picasso and the cartoonist Edward Gorey (with whom he shares a fascination for the macabre) and the influence of urban graffiti and the work of Dubuffet. His work is also reminiscent of the stronly linear protests of George Grosz. Richards underscores the monstrous in work which cries out against the dehumanizing, brutalizing effects of urban existence.

Richards has himself spent time in the hospital as the result of a mugging, and he recently intervened to break up the beating of an elderly man. These prints serve as another kind of intervention, a warning to the viewer. His show, titled The Eleventh Hour, offers a vision we would do well to heed just before the turn of the new millenium..."