NEIL RIZOS     1962 -

Nature fascinates Neil Rizos, and wherever he has traveled and lived, he has managed to capture and convey the unique aspects of the environment in his pictures.  His interest in nature is, furthermore, scientific as well as aesthetic.

Working as an ornithological researcher, Rizos led a crew that studied bird behavior and habitat in a remote region of Alaska for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and he worked alone on a study of raptors in Montana for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.  He conducted research on the Harris' Hawk for the University of Arizona and served as expedition artist with a Hudson Bay research group for Fisheries and Oceans Canada.  All the time he was working on the scientific projects, Rizos was sketching and painting, for he is, above all other things, an artist.

Rizos was born in Boston in 1962; however, his childhood home was on a bluff overlooking the sea on Cape Cod, a place of light, wind, water, birds, beaches and forests.  He majored in French and Spanish at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, taking advantage of university- sponsored programs in Paris, Seville and Costa Rica.  Following college, in preparation for the career he had chosen in art, he studied painting privately with several noted instructors and took courses in printmaking at SUNY Potsdam.  Rizos is an experimenter and innovator by nature, and in both his painting and his prints, he employs a variety of styles that he has developed on his own.  Birds and landscapes are the subjects of nearly all of his work, for he is, in every sense of the term, a naturalist.

In recent years, Rizos has taken positions as artist-in-residence at art centers in New Mexico, Ireland, the Adirondacks and Virginia, where he currently resides.  His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Canada in more than two dozen one-man shows, he has been engaged frequently as a teacher and lecturer and he has received grants for both his artistic work and ornithological research.

A versatile artist, skilled in sculpture as well as painting and intaglio printmaking, Rizos works in a variety of techniques within each of these media, producing work that is diverse in style.  Clyde Aspevig, a noted painter and one of Rizos' teachers, has written:

"I have several pieces of Neil's work in my personal collection.  They bring me a step closer to appreciating nature in a way I never would have conceived through my own experience.  His work gives the viewer more than just surface appearance."

The reason, of course, is that Rizos has far more than a superficial appreciation and understanding of his subjects, something that could be acquired only through years of experience and dedicated study.

Source:  correspondence and conversations with the artist.

The last two pages of the six page section within The American Sporting Print which features my etchings.