Richard Sudden is a contemporary multimedia artist, whose work has been collected and exhibited widely, and who continues to make new and compelling collections of work. He has employed everything from cast concrete and steel to AI technologies to express his global art. Sudden was born into the semi-nomadic life of a military dependent, and from the earliest age, developed an interminable case of wanderlust (he was the subject of two search parties before the age of five). That love of exploring continued to develop with treks and travels with his family and friends and with even greater purpose in adulthood; with journeys focused on the observation, recording, and collecting of signs and symbols, rituals, and sacred edifice from around the world. And although travel and foreign cultures have been one of Sudden‘s greatest inspirations his other passion has been books and journals. A bookstore owner at age 22, his interest gravitated to world religions, philosophy, art, and nature; their languages, symbols, and rituals, and to all the wonderful and mysterious places their study could take him. These influences became his artwork. Traveling and recording the symbols and evolution of language in diverse cultures around the world, from Voodoo in Haiti to petroglyphs in the Australian outback, from the American Southwest to Tibetan monasteries and the Mayan and Incan cultures of central and South America. Sudden has turned his observations into his own visual language. Using both traditional methods and materials in his work as well as the latest technologies. 2 and 3 dimensional work, installations, sound and video, and AI, have all been explored to create his work.

“Sudden’s intellectual travels are as broad as his worldly ones”, wrote critic Catherine Fox in a review of his exhibition of new works entitled, “Ex Libris”, a follow up to his “Notes from the Library of Babel”, of which critic Jerry Cullum wrote “These paintings are a worthy testament to the artist’s lifelong exploration of symbolic forms and of ways of making effective works of art.”