While Glenda Richter taught in the English Department at Grossmont College, she began her study in art.

Teachers include faculty at Grossmont and Cuyamaca Colleges, various teachers at the Atheneum, Grace Chow for Chinese Brush, and Cas Holmes, a British fabric artist who works with paper, fabric, found objects, and free-hand stitching. You will see Holmes’s influence in Glenda’s collage work.

When Richter discovered acrylics and the magic forgiveness of gesso, she worked mostly in acrylics.

But her true interest is in collage — combining an Asian art aesthetic with her appreciation for texture and color and varied materials. Words are sometimes part of those varied materials. Although she retired from teaching writing, she has not been able to eliminate words entirely from her visual arts.

Richter considers much of her work a personal history—a visual memory of important events and places in her life.

Her art is grounded in rural Illinois where she grew up and spent time with her grandparents who saved everything. They saved bits of cloth for quilts or hand-braided rungs. They saved seeds for next year’s crop and garden.

Now she saves everything– scraps from sewing projects, scraps from magazines, junk mail, advertisements. And she gives these scraps new life.

(Courtesy photos)