welcome to the new!

It feels amazing to be launching a brand-new site to share my art direction, design and art.

I was sick of my totally fine, totally utilitarian and pretty old site. I was shocked to find that I had used the same base template for over 6 years.

It’s the right time for a new start, as I have recently transitioned into the exciting, sometimes nerve-wracking world of being an independent, self-employed creative.

I hope you like what you see. I would love to hear from you, regardless of whether you currently have a project to propose working on together. Use the Contact form to send me an email. Connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram. Follow me and comment on my work on society6.com/joelrichter — and better yet, please buy some of my art!

Thanks again for checking out my website and my work. I’m honored that you’re here, and I’m thrilled for this new chapter of my creative career.

Oh yeah! If you’re wondering, “What’s up with the Aurora Borealis video and images? And why the fog photos?”

The fog question is easy: it’s my favorite art supply. Since I love landscapes and seascapes and cityscapes that take on a mysterious, even sometimes abstracting quality through various means, fog is one of the best natural means to that end.

And then… I have always been enchanted by the Northern Lights, like many other people. I was born in far northern British Columbia, Canada, and my parents often talked about the fact that the Aurora Borealis was often so strong in the long nights of the winter that you could actually hear a sort of “synthsizer-angelic-chorus” celestial sound accompanying the strong light show. I was fortunate to see the Northern Lights sometimes in the countryside after we moved to the Toronto area, and sometimes when visiting northern Wisconsin.

But my most magical experience with the phenomenon occurred when my partner, Patrick, and I visited Iceland in late November a few years ago. We went to Þingvellir National Park near Reykjavík on a tour near midnight on an extremely cold windy night. Naturally, there’s no guaranteeing you will see anything except snow and a great view of the Milky Way if it’s a clear night. The tour guide, an experienced metereologist, said she had low confidence we’d see anything because her tours had seen nothing the previous two nights.

Still, it was fun to be out in the windy dark with several dozen people from our bus and several other buses, in the middle of the big, quiet, snow-covered national park that sits on the Mid-Atlantic Rift between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. We saw some milky clouds low near the horizon, which the tour guide explained are actually a very mild, very common form of Aurora Borealis. And it was majestic to be able to see millions of stars and many planets, satellites, and the brightest widest view of the Milky Way I’ve ever seen. As the hours wore on, the wind chill drove temperatures lower than 20 below and many tourists grew tired of waiting to see if more active Northern Lights would appeara. Many people went into the bus to sleep. Patrick and I huddled behind a wooden wind-screen with others.

Suddenly, we heard the tour guide yelling excitedly for everyone to gather and see what was happening. In the span of a few moments, the milky white “clouds” rapidly changed into ribbons of green light that began to move and shimmer and dance across the sky. It was awe-inspiring, magical, and mystical. Everyone was quiet and just watching the skies shimmering with the gorgeous glowing green. If you looked through the professional cameras that many people had set up on tripods, you could see a deeper green version of what the naked eye perceived as a lighter and softer green. We just stood together under the Milky Way, feeling grateful to be witnessing the relatively rare view of this natural light show. I was overtaken by an overhelmingly beautiful sense of being tiny and insignificant, just a speck of humanity in a gigantic universe of wonder.

It was the same feeling that I had in 2022 when we went whale watching near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and saw several majestic gigantic whales spouting and breaching and jumping, slapping their tails on the water, and many recently born baby whales learning how to do what their mothers were teaching them to do. And listening to the eerie, intensely loud, compelling sounds of whale songs being called out below and around the boat.

But back to the Iceland experience. As we happily rode the bus back to Reykjavík at 2 a.m., most people were asleep, but Patrick and I talked quiety about how awesome it had been, and about what we were going to do the following day in the awesome small city, where we were staying at the home of a tall blond guy literally named Thor. Looking toward the Atlantic coast, we noticed a reddish glowing cloud had appeared in the distance, and was then accompanied by some bright green ribbons as well. We exclaimed that it seemed like the northern lights had followed us toward the city, and soon, the tour guide was kind of shouting into the microphone, “Everyone, wake up, wake up! I’m sorry, but you have to see this! It’s extremely rare to see red Aurora in Iceland, and yet tonight we are being given the gift of not just these green ribbons but look at those long horizontal streams of red!” She had explained at Þingvellir that the colors of the Northern Lights are caused by different gases in the earth’s atmosphere. And that certain colors predominate in Scandinavian countries, in Canada, in Alaska. But that in Iceland, they primarily get green and really don’t get purples or reds.