Rich Shapero

About The Artist

Rich was born in 1948 in Los Angeles. In grammar school, he read Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. “It attempted to envision a higher human state,” Rich says, “which captivated me at the time, and still captivates me. By the time I had reached puberty, I’d read Nathanael West and Arthur Machen, and the die was cast. I was convinced that fiction would lead me down a long corridor, and I could see ‘Exit’ flashing at the end of it.”

In 1965, Rich started college at Berkeley. He majored in English lit, finding heroes both within his coursework and outside—William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walter Pater and Henri Bergson. “All of them were important to me because they saw our everyday world as a veil, behind which a world more profound, more alive, and more real, was waiting to be discovered.”

Projects

Wild Animus

Rich Shapero’s Wild Animus is the story of a young idealist, Ransom Altman, whose quest for fundamentals drives him to the Alaskan wilderness where, alone with his dangerous ideas, he transforms himself into a wild creature prey to a strangely familiar pack of wolves. To tell his story, Shapero has crafted a new art form that intricately interweaves book and music.

Discover

François Burland

François Burland is a highly acclaimed visionary artist, often counted among painters of the Art Brut aesthetic. He has brought Wild Animus alive through a recently completed series.

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Eugene Von Bruencheinhein

Rich’s passion for the work of Visionary artist Eugene Von Bruenchenhein motivated him to seek out and publicly display the best of the artist’s paintings from 1954-1963 at vonbruenchenhein.com.

“I first saw Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s paintings in 2003. I found them mysterious and evocative, and full of energy. The more I looked at them, the more they expanded beyond the borders of the frame. They seemed to carry with them a complex history, as if they were glimpses of a world distant from our own. Many appeared to depict an event—on land, underwater, or in deep space—drawn from some alien cosmogony. The paintings were relatively inexpensive, so I purchased a few. A couple of years later, I purchased a few more. And a few more. I loved the places they took me and the power they had to stimulate my imagination. Finally, my enthusiasm for the paintings reached the point that I wanted to share them. So, in May, 2009, we launched vonbruenchenhein.com.”

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