currently untitled, oil on canvas, 60" x 48", Rico '13
It's not just about beauty. I'm interested in magnificence and wonder. The oceans and mountains stir in us the sensations of both admiration and fear. Nature, as anyone who spends time outdoors will tell you, must be respected; and there's a heavy price for not doing so. I have a deep love of the epic and vast landscapes of deserts and oceans and the arctic. They are to me the places of the gods, old and new. I'm concerned with the primordial and divine, even though I practice religious abstinence as a rule in my personal life.
I don't know that I've gotten to that place yet in my work, but I feel I'm getting close. I don't care about cleverness, -I loathe it in art to be brutally honest. I respect work that is powerful and muscular, or ethereal and fluid, and defies itself; whatever that self may be. I believe that so-called color field abstraction is the great unfulfilled promise of the Ab Ex movement. It was snuffed, -not because of the exhaustion of its ideas, but because of the fear of its mysticism. Hard edge and geometrical abstraction, -to my mind, won the day because it is far easier to be intellectual than to trade in matters of the soul. I have nothing against that kind of abstract painting, I have more friends and acquaintances that paint in those styles than paint like me. Being an exile, I have the freedom to associate with painters I respect, and that in fact don't seem immediately related to my aesthetic, even though they often are in subtle ways. I like good art. I hate bad art. The "style" has jack to do with whether a painting succeeds or fails; it's what's behind it and in it and what comes through it.
I'm an artist because I'm invested in working toward the perfection of my ideas. I may not get there, but it doesn't really matter. The journey will continue to transform me and perhaps a few others along the way. I may never sell another painting and there are times when that is so incredibly liberating. When work sells it gives voice to all those other aspects of self that try to come into the studio: the critic, the procrastinator, the naysayer and the conformist. The best work I've sold has sometimes been undocumented, and there's something fitting about that. I can't refer to it as a template. I can't ever look at it again and say, "yeah, I should do 20 of those." Working towards the perfection of my ideas means that the work leads the way. I follow it; sometimes unwillingly, sometimes in wild abandon. I don't paint like I did 8, 5 or even 1 year ago. There is a vernacular, -I suppose that's unavoidable and perhaps that is what people refer to when they refer to style. It's my manner of painting, but it isn't conscious. I repeat themes, but I attack them differently as I learn from each painting. I believe that every painting should be autonomous in the studio.
I was thinking today how fortunate I am to have to grapple with doubt as often as I do. Some never doubt themselves or question their existence, and so far in my experience I find them to be not very interesting people and often quite tedious. Fundamentalists of all persuasions are the worst; there are few traits more tiresome in a human being than certitude and self-righteousness. But to have to climb into the ring against yourself, that is to my mind the measure of man and the essence of an artist. You can't fake yourself out, and you can't really ever cheat your art because your soul will not give you comfort if you do. There is what Martha Graham called "that divine unrest" that drives the true artist to push through and beyond and to keep going when it feels like they are all alone in a place no one will ever see or know, much less understand. I believe one has to go to those places and bring it back and put it up on the wall, or on the page, or on stage. You have to take us as the audience on that great quest. It may be the closest some of them ever get to a real quest in their lives. That's the artist's charge.
