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April 10th, 2008

Kismet #2
AC 2007.12
Richard Yarde, American, born 1939
Watercolor and gouache on paper, 2006
Purchase with Wise Fund for Fine Arts


The most recent watercolor in this exhibition demonstrates contemporary developments in the medium. The painting’s large scale and dazzling colors offer a bold and loud approach uncharacteristic of conventional watercolors. 

Kismet #2 addresses themes of life’s fragility, the five senses, and childhood recreation. The artist, a former Amherst teacher and currently Professor of Fine Art at UMass-Amherst, depicts a game of Snakes and Ladders, based on a Hindu morality game in which virtues (ladders) and vices (snakes) determine a player’s path toward Nirvana. Yarde painted some of the blocks with Braille numbers and others with organic forms reminiscent of a fruit tree or internal organs. The artist’s battle with an illness that left him with numb hands may have inspired his visual inclusion of the tactile language system, and his frustration with an uncontrollable nervous system may explain his decision to paint a game of fate. (The title’s ‘Kismet’ is an Arabic-derived word for fate.)

Despite its serious themes, Yarde keeps the mood light, as with the flick of his brush, one of the snakes seems to be escaping in the upper right corner of the painting.

Written by Yin He, Class of 2010