Richard Ciccimarra

Canadian, 1924 - 1973

Active LocationVictoria, British Columbia, Canada

BiographyRichard Ciccimarra arrived in Victoria in 1955, one year after Herbert Siebner. He was born into a cultured bourgeois Viennese family and moved to England in 1948 where he married. In 1949, he and his wife moved to the West Indies. The couple and a friend bought a yacht in Barbados to run charters for tourists hopping between the islands. There he made loose watercolour sketches mainly of the landscapes, charming in their simplicity and vibrant colour. At this time, the lives of the Bahamian people fascinated him, although many of his strongest impressions did not emerge in his completed works until six or seven years later after he settled in Victoria.

The work he created during his first few years in Victoria reflected West Indian subject matter, such as Laughing Woman and Woman with Oranges. Like Bates and Siebner, Ciccimarra's work explores Expressionism, especially the influences of the Viennese Expressionist painters. Like the work of Austrian portrait painter, Egon Schiele, Ciccimarra's work has a haunting sense of ennui. At the start of the 1960s, he suffered bouts of serious depression and his work, such as Descent (1968), became more tentative and existential. By 1973, his health was failing and, not long after the Limners officially formed, Ciccimarra died. Colin Graham exhibited Ciccimarra's work in exhibitions in 1958, 1962, 1964, and curated his memorial exhibition in 1974.

Person TypeIndividual