About Me & Me Art
The Who (not the band)
Rick is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and got his masters in printmaking from Pratt Institute. He teaches art courses to all ages, though mostly at the college level. He also has a small mural company, Muralworkz (www.muralworkz.com), and has a process that allows kids of all ages to design their own murals, but with a professional final touch. He has worked in schools, museums and public and private spaces. A good portion of his life has been spent at the family home on Martha’s Vineyard and as such a great portion of his representational imagery is rooted in life there. Aside from his own work, he does commissions and projects of both fine art and graphic design. It can also be said that he does not like talking about himself in the third person.
WARNING: Do not read unless unable to sleep!
The How
I am often asked what kind of artist am I? And I don’t know really how to answer such an open question. I work in two-dimensions (no time for that 3rd D!). But I work in many mediums. Paint (watercolor/acrylic/oil), drawing, photography (either as source material or I paint with light), printmaking, digital printmaking. I got my masters in printmaking. I became a printmaker because it could involve all my mediums plus it uses process. A process is not just multiple steps to get to a resolution. A process is something you set up, put work into, aim where you want it to go and let it fly. So, unlike painting or drawing, where you can see how successful you are immediately after you put energy in and do the work, you don’t get to see the results of your actions until sometime after you have put in energy and work. You hope the result is what you were aiming at or at least a happy ‘accident’. But maybe it doesn’t work. If that happens, and it does, then you have the challenge of what do you do about it. And my attitude is, if you put energy into it, you don’t quit. You figure it out, which might take some time, but that is part of the adventure, the puzzle. And in my experience the highest high I get from my work when it is done, is when I have taken something that was a miserable failure and turned it into something I really like. Bottle that and you’ll be famous! So, there is a bit more mystery and excitement for me with process. I have been fooling with it for decades.
Long before Photoshop and digital work existed, I was putting color slides in black and white enlargers, making paper negatives, double exposures and anything I could think of to alter a process in some way. I learned to use my camera to paint with light by photographing the energy of light moving across the viewfinder, like drawing, but with photons. In serigraphy (silk-screening), you make a screen with an image that is ‘open’ and the rest of the screen is ‘closed’. You pull ink over it and the image (the part that was open) is printed on a piece of paper. You put another screen on with a secondary image and print a second color on the paper (in register). If the ink is too thick, it dries in the screen and each print will be different and therefore no good. If the ink is too thin, it bleeds out and you lose detail and make a blobby mess. I learned if you could print really well and consistently, you can use this. Here’s an example: If I print bright red that is too thin, I make a mess, but if I am good enough, I can make that mess consistent on each paper. Then I clean off the red and print black at the right thickness with the same screen and get my detail back because now it prints the image, exactly what was open on the screen, but nothing more or less. Only now, around the black detail is a tiny electric red line.
Also, in printmaking, we work with layers. In painting, you modify the forms you are making, we call this pushing and pulling the image, with each brush stroke. With printmaking you also push and pull the image, but with layers. I have developed my digital work to the point where I am doing this also. So, my digital images are a combination of process + layers along with my photograph, drawing and/or painting. I found an online processor that literally wraps the algorithm of an image around the algorithm of another image. Like putting an aquatint on an etching plate. And like an aquatint, I don’t know exactly what will happen until it is done. It makes for an interesting step/layer in my overall process. I have been asked what I call this method and the closest I can come up with is digital printmaking. This is because it does everything I love about printmaking. Although printmaking is also about making limited editions and it is the art of making multiples (as oppose to making copies of an original. There is no ‘original’). Though this makes sense to me to call it this, I am quite sure traditional printmakers, and my mentor would take me to task about it.
Ultimately, my oldest and favorite tool to building my images, is my line. Mostly with pen, I have learned to ride my line from adventure to adventure. I may start with a structure to grow from, but I never know where my line, as directed by my eye and hand, will take me as I do not apply much in the way of conscious control. I do not determine where I am going, only the direction of my path. My line informs me, not the other way around. When I paint, I am still thinking in line and I believe my work shows that. Lines are like feet. They take you to many different places and experiences, but you still go there on the same feet.
The What
The other way to answer the ‘what kind of artist am I?’ question is about my concepts and content. Let me first say that the closest I ever read to explain my overall thinking came from Aldous Huxley’s ‘Doors of Perception’. For those that don’t know it, I will explain. In 1953 a doctor in NYC was experimenting with mescaline to see what medical or therapeutic uses it could have. It is a hallucinatory drug that was around before LSD. The doctor administered it to Huxley in his NYC apartment with his wife there. He started to write this essay. When he could no longer write, they turned on a reel-to-reel recorder to record him as he spoke. They put him and the recorder into a car and drove him around the City. Then back at the apartment as he started to come down, he went back to writing. He put the revelations he had into this essay. The essay states that our senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell) are our doors through which we perceive the world. Some have better and others less of certain of these abilities. He went on to say chemicals can open other doors of our perceptions of the world. His conclusion, which I love, is that artists do not need chemicals to open other doors. We can just do it. No external help needed (although I do find music supportive for me when I am in this state). BTW, do you know what great ‘60s band took their name from that essay?
My perceptions have evolved over time, guided by my experiences and creative inspirations. I see the world as patterns, forms and color that are layered together. However, the pieces I see are abstract and unrelated to what is created in the final image that everyone else sees. They say stop and smell the roses. But, when I am looking at those roses, I also am looking at the forms that make up the flowers, as well as the color and the way they are positioned in their environment. And I do not use my conscious mind very much when I build. I trust and rely on my eye and hand with an unconscious bit of guidance. Sometimes I aim at a representational image (based on my photography) and sometimes my base structure is something else. Always though, it is my eye and hand that bring things together or break them apart. I start with a structure and then see where it takes me instead of deciding where I am going to go. It puts the mystery into the adventure and creates the challenge of can I make it work?
Being a printmaker, I started to notice how images were built from pieces. And how those pieces themselves may not have anything to do with the final image, though they are an integral part of it. A squiggle of red could be an edge of the horizon during a sunset. Leaves on a realistic tree could be made up of odd, non-leaf looking shapes that add together into something very believable. Look at Andrew Wyeth’s Cristina’s World. It is a hauntingly realistic image. However, if you get very close to it and look at where the underlayers peek through, they are not very realistic. The point is the pieces that are used to build an image do not need to be directly related to the final outcome as long as they do their job as a brick in the build. Like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the shape of the individual pieces has nothing to do with the final design when it is put together, but without them there can be no final design. To take it a step further, if a printmaker makes one layer out of register, then the whole image is subverted. However, though this is an accident and usually a bad thing, it can sometimes produce an interesting result, maybe even inspirational. I once had a color reproduction of a serigraph of mine printed in the Union Leader Newspaper. It was of a sunrise over the view from the front of my family home on Martha’s Vineyard. The sky was a pattern that went from yellow at the horizon to a sky blue at the top of the piece. In the newspaper reproduction, the color was printed slightly out of register. So, a thin red line or halo was created along the horizon line, above the trees and under the yellow. It was perfect! Why didn’t I think of that!!
So, I learned to play with that and see where it takes me. Imagine that you are drawing a landscape with a sky. If, instead of putting marks in the sky that you might relate to that sky, start in the upper corner and write your name. At the end of your name, don’t leave a space like you normally would, just continue and write your name again. And again, all the way across the paper. When you are done start a second line but leave no space between the lines, so they are touching. Think of all the letters and lines as welded to the ones around them, no spaces. And start the second line in the middle of your name so that the letters directly above are different letters. Fill the whole sky that way. When you are done, the first reaction of the viewer will be to see a sky because you placed the marks in a way that suggests that is what it is. Afterwards, the viewer will notice there is a pattern there and will look closer and see that it is made up of words. They get the message (it is a sky), they get there is a pattern worth a closer inspection, they get it is your name and all the while they have been looking deeper at your piece as well as more intellectually involved. But their first reaction will be to see a sky. This is where I play, and it is like building a castle with kid’s blocks and having different blocks to play with each time.
Thanks to my late dear friend Tony, I found this online processor that lays a texture onto my imagery. Unlike an aquatint or sugar lift (printmaking processes), I can add an infinite variety of textures into my work. If inside a computer, it views an image as an algorithm, then this is a lot like it that’s the algorithm of one image and wraps it around the algorithm of another. I can choose what image or style I want to wrap around my piece and then set the settings of the processor and see what happens. Like putting a rosin aquatint on an etching plate. Blocking out areas, putting it in the acid, blocking out more areas and then more acid. Clean it off and print it to see if I got the affect I wanted. With this online processor, I have an infinite amount of image/style choices to use and therefore it is even more difficult to aim. Then combine this with many other layers of digital manipulation until I end up somewhere that works for me.
However, my main tool to build with is and always has been my line. And I have been letting my eye and hand, tempered by my mind (both consciously and mostly unconsciously) for a long time. I like where it has evolved to. To some drawing a line is a conscious, determined endeavor. They want it to go from here to there to show something, like an edge or as a pointer. All lines are pointers. They think about what they are doing and do it by the instructions they gave themselves. Many might even get nervous, which affects the line, because they think that pen is difficult and restricting. Oh my! What if I make a mistake?!? I can’t erase it! The better way to look at it is as a freedom. Instead of being locked into an original intention, these are the marks I made, now what do I have to do to make them work. I say I don’t make mistakes; I make spontaneous creative variations! And I never decide where I am going to end up. I only have a general direction and then see what happens. My hand flies and my eyes seem to know what are interesting combinations of marks. Perhaps I will follow the edge of the structure of a subject or just the edge of a paint stroke or maybe follow nothing at all. My hand makes patterns, swirls or shades pretty much on its own. I don’t decide, I just go. And when I start to see something recognizable happening, I may purposely draw additional lines to help bring it out. If, however, something causes me to hesitate, i.e., not sure what to do next, then I return control to my eye and hand. I am not consciously deciding to do this or that, though I am feeling it. I suppose it is like a musician jamming. I am watching and it is happening. That is a bit why I like music, especially live music while I work. The energy around me from it helps my hand fly and probably guides it in ways I am unaware of consciously. So, things may appear or not. If you do think you see something in my line work, I admit to nothing. I don’t know what you are talking about. It must be YOUR imagination. Along the way and near the end I do apply some purposeful modification to help the overall piece be balanced and work. And if I am particularly unhappy with any area, then it is a challenge to figure out how to modify what is there into something that works for me.
If I get a smile out of a viewer, or perhaps a second look, then I feel I succeeded. If they look at my work longer and deeper, then I really succeeded. I hope you enjoy the places my doors of my perception take you.
P.S. I forgot to mention that an underlying tone for me is that I believe silly is a state of grace.