Richard Weis has had a long career as an artist/teacher beginning in the 1960s in Bemidji Minnesota.  Teaching opportunities and advanced study led him to Wisconsin, Oregon, Northern Virginia, Washington  D.C. , Ohio, Indiana and eventually to Vermont. He joined the faculty of Green Mountain College in 1989 and worked there until retiring from full time teaching in 2010.

Over the past 50 plus years his personal artwork has continually evolved as he explored the places in which has lived through the dynamics of visual form.  His early career was founded upon the design and perceptual ideas of Josef Albers as transmitted by his mentor Keith Malmquist, a student of Albers. Later in graduate school, he transitioned into more figurative work,  completing his M.F.A. in painting at The American University in Washington D.C. In 1973 where he won the David Lloyd Kreeger Award for graduate painting.

His current work continues to draw upon the experience of “place” providing more opportunity for discovery and improvisation then one might   He likes to paraphrase a line by W.H. Auden “…to discover what it is to be human now, is the reason we follow this star…”

Richard has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad.  In 2002-2003 he was invited to be a visiting artist at Aberystwyth University in Wales and received a Fulbright Scholar Award to work as an Artist in Residence in South Korea.  In the fall of 2010 he was invited back to Korea through the Fulbright Senior Specialist Program to work with students and faculty in the art education department at Hannam University. 

Richard maintains studios in Castleton and Poultney Vermont and shares his life and work with artist Nancy Pulliam Weis.