Artist Roster

Rick Rothrock’s artwork encompasses studio work and public environmental installations. With its vocabulary of geometry and composition, Rick’s artwork strives to communicate the sense of beauty, reconciliation and peace that he finds predominant in nature. Stone has been the primary material featured in Rick's work for decades. Most of the artworks are monolithic yet have compositions relying on multiple relationships of material, form, color, texture, balance and movement. The abstraction in these works reveals the physical and visual phenomena that exist in nature rather than represent fauna and flora. Many of his artworks contrast the natural surface and structure of stone with its inner and invisible beauty.

Through public works he seeks to energize a place by evoking something essential in its nature by considering the unseen forces of the seasons and providing a platform for human interaction as part of the subject matter. Seating, solar orientation, traffic patterns, material, and language encourage relationships between the people, the sculpture, and the natural physical world. Rick has several large public installations in Delaware. Rendezvous - Two Views Common Ground   at   Freedom Plaza in Wilmington encourages the public to interact with the sculpture. One chooses to sit in or out of the flow of foot traffic and simultaneously view what is occurring on the other side. The geometry of the stone and the solar orientation creates a changing play of light throughout the day. Three Mill Pylons compliments the structure of an architectural design award winning building while offering a place to sit outside of the entrance. Reflection at Can-Do Playground is playful while Twin Obelisks for Brownie in Clifford Brown Gardens and Quill and Cube at Constitution Park in Dover, DE are educational and interactive. Rick’s public environments evoke curiosity, encourage exploration, and promote interpersonal interaction. Rick also has several public art installations in Vermont and has been included in the collections of corporations and museums.

Rick was trained as an educator, a craftsman and an artist. He holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Education and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture. He also studied stone carving in Pietrasanta, Italy. As an advocate for the arts, Rick initiated the establishment of the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts in 1978. Rick is a founding member of the international artists consortium, SYNE and has exhibited in Sweden, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and the USA. He was chosen to travel to China as an official Delaware Ambassador of the Arts in 1998. Rick is an instructor at the Carving Studio in Vermont has been an invited artist to several sculpture symposiums. In 2009 he received the Christi Award for Outstanding Achievement as an Artist and was awarded the Masters Fellowship Grant in Visual Arts from the Delaware Division of the Arts in 2011.