Rick Landesberg

As a student attending Central Saint Martins College of Art (then Saint Martins School of Art) in London during his junior year in the early 1970s, Rick traveled to Scotland every chance he could. Witnessing that northern landscape was a powerful, formative experience that has continued to inform his work and his aesthetic. “The issue for me isn’t simply what that mysterious environment looked like - the ever-changing skies, the mercurial weather, the dramatic shifts of sun and shadow. It was the character and spirit of places of this sort.” The list of these places has grown to include the southwest of England, Downeast Maine, the Tarn region of France, eastern rural Ohio, and western Pennsylvania.” In the act of painting his focus is on what these places do, what they mean, what they suggest rather than trying to depict what they look like.

“So many artists across time have re-invented places so well and so inventively with pitch-perfect tensions between a depicted landscape and the physicality of the painting itself,” Rick offers. “Piero Della Francesca, Joan Mitchell, Jacob van Ruisdael, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (especially in Italy), Camille Pissarro, Fairfield Porter. I have to add to the list three painters whose work also embodies that strange Philadelphia aesthetic, my former teachers Larry Day and Sidney Goodman, and dear friend Neysa Grassi.”

Many paintings begin with his witnessing a particular place, but this serves only as a departure point. The loyalty is always to the painting and the experience of its making.

Born in Philadelphia, Rick earned a BFA in Painting from the University of the Arts (then Philadelphia College of Art) and a Certificate of Studies from Central Saint Martins College of Art, London. He lives in Pittsburgh and spends much of the year in East Blue Hill, Maine.

Rick is the founder and former head of Landesberg Design, a creative office devoted to communication design for the common good. His clients included the United Nations, the Rockefeller Foundation, and many of the country’s leading foundations, colleges, and universities. For over 15 years he served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design. He’s a recipient of the AIGA Fellow Award.

Rick’s TEDx presentation “Design and Generosity” can be seen on YouTube.

In 2019, Rick led a two-week travel sketchbook workshop in the Tarn region of France, a setting he’s returned to regularly to paint. In early 2022, he was a Visiting Artist at West Virginia University’s College of Creative Arts. In late 2022, he participated in a four-person exhibit at the Carter Burden Gallery in New York City, and he taught “Using the Sketchbook to Enhance the Travel Experience,” a workshop at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Rick’s solo exhibition, The Crest of the Ridge, was held at Pittsburgh’s 707 Gallery in early 2023. In spring 2024 he exhibited at the Artemis Gallery in Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, Maine.

Rick was one of 12 artists selected to participate in the 2023 Art Week residency held on Great Spruce Head Island in Maine. He directed a number of sketchbook workshops in 2023 and 2024, including one at the Carrie Furnaces National Historic Landmark near Pittsburgh, and sites on Maine’s Blue Hill Peninsula.