time away

Life comes in; there you have it. Days turn to weeks at the blink of an eye in my life now, so weeks away happen and I feel that tense-empty feeling creep up and take me over. Time away is good, it has the ability to give eyes in a way. Frenetic pitch is good too, it leaves no time for doubt and questions and analysis...action has its own seduction.

I sit on top of a large body of work now. It was an ambitious process, a Dare of magnitude and significance and, in the end (but I'll leave that to others to decide) of some possible importance in the oeuvre of Rico.

In my angry moments (and there are some, yes indeed), I paint to kill Warhol, to kill Jasper Johns, to kill all that nudge-nudge-wink-wink crap that makes great poster art and feeds our cynicism and endless appetites for the so-called new. Burn it. Toss Koons and Hirst on the bonfire and let our vanities grow cold and hungry once again. This is about PAINT. What it can do, what it has yet to discover, unveil, instruct, alter and offer. Paint on surface; no pretty edges to offer up illusion. The Unclean, there for you to digest -if you can, if you have the stuff. I don't do it for me, and I am unabashedly spiritual and shamelessly in search of the Sublime. If these pursuits amount to a career death sentence, so be it.

When I look at the work in the studio now, the words of Motherwell haunt the space..."an art stripped bare," exposed, naked before you like Manet's Olympia. Approach it, -gauntlet thrown-, bring it if you feel you can. I do this shit, I don't play at it. I'm going to break it all open, and that is my word.