#secretshow

I made the decision to let some of the paintings from "the 50" be shown in a commercial gallery in SC.   I dedicated all of 2011 to a very specific exploration of color and technique in the studio and "the50" are the result.   At the suggestion of a friend from the West Coast, I hung all of them in an enormous grid in my studio; and I have to give it to her, it was fairly magnificent.

The work has been stored ever since, and at the end of 2011 I was already moving toward the black and white work that I'm doing now and plan to continue indefinately.  So these paintings are unique to me, and likely to never be repeated.  I've given one gallery exclusive access to the entire cache, the works have been selected, and they will be shown in Greenville, SC in March.  I decided rather than to promote the show in the normal way of a flier, that I would take a very different approach and not tell anyone where it is until the last minute.  So the idea of the "secret show" was hatched; replete with hashtag.

Another enticement for this show is that it is a chance to pick up one of my paintings for 3 figures.  Think of it as akin to a low IPO on art futures, and don't wish you had gotten it when.  So follow #secretshow for details and more teasers, including previews of the works included.

Follow me on Twitter as @ChristopherRico

St. Christopher

untitled study, 4" x 7", oil on canvas board, Rico '13

"Hang on St. Christopher through the

smoke and the oil, buckle down the rumble seat

let the radiator boil..."  -Tom Waits

I submitted work to ArtFields, an interesting endeavor in the small town of Lake City, South Carolina.  It is my first attempt in a very long time to exhibit work in the state in which I have lived for over a decade.  The moment felt right, the work is ready to be seen and so I stuck my neck out.  I'll update this blog in a couple of weeks when I hear the panel's decision.  Either way, I will pull no punches about the process, the festival and the quality of work exhibited.  They want to make some noise.  So do I.

My head is in NYC at the moment.  I found out there will be a large Basquiat exhibit going on while I'm there and I look forward to seeing what else is on the walls.  My Greenville dealer is coming down next week for a studio visit, so that will be what it is.  Always a pleasure to host Teresa, she is one of those rare people who genuinely loves, and I mean loves art and artists.  There are times I wished we both lived in another part of the world; I feel we could move a tremendous amount of paintings.

I've been down with health issues all week, despite my overall healthy lifestyle.  There are parts of growing old that don't bother me one bit and there are parts that completely stink.  Death is the price of life, no one avoids the long march into night.   I hope I go in my studio with stained fingers and the paint still wet on whatever I was working on. 

Between the cold and illness I haven't worked in over a week, which causes tremendous internal stress. I've so much to do, several works in process and I need to get back in the studio for these things and my own sanity.  I hope to catch a break this weekend.   Until then I hold on.

drift

"Buffalo 2", in progress, oil on canvas

60" x 48", Rico '13

There's this sense of living with the work.  I don't know how to explain it; I start a painting and it is like I'm searching for which note will come next as I play.  That's the thing, -one feels the way through; it isn't prescribed or a picture in the head thing.  It's organic.  Paintings evolve and for me it is almost a call and response relationship for weeks or months or years.  Paint is laid down.  Sometimes in earnest, sometimes tentatively at first (though one has to overcome that immediately).    I do a lot of looking.  Eventually I see.

This one wouldn't let me go.  Thought it was nearly done last year but it wasn't.  I painted out huge swaths of it over the weekend because I wanted that openness in the composition.  I wanted to take it right up to looking incomplete.  Maybe that's how we are; that's the human condition.

I'm becoming more interested in gray.  

New canvases arrived today, along with black gesso and tubes of Mars black.  I can't stop now, I'm in deep.

voice

The rain came down on the tin roof of the studio last night and there was jazz, mournful and ethereal, filling the space.  I had deemed a painting lost just before the New Year, but decided to go back into it and keep in it.  It is slow going but it it coming.  It feels like sculpting stone, as I've had to chip here and there and wait and look and try to see.

A cigar and a nice Roija and contemplation as the paint dried.  I looked over some of the newer studies; I looked around the studio and I felt a sense of singularity -a sense of voice.  There are those who say that there is nothing new.  I say that when one is open and honest and seeks out their voice, that expression is unique in the universe.  It has never been and it will never be again.  I've no concern for novelty for its own sake.  I try to stay open and to paint through.

I've been in this studio for 5 years this month.  It is a second home, a respite to a working father and husband and gentleman.  It is my Byronic island where I detach myself from the world.  There will be construction this month, a new wall on the south side.  The space will change, but I am changing and my work is changing and evolution is fitting and natural to the sustained purpose of things.

 

the spiritual in art

currently untitled, oil on canvas, 60" x 48", Rico '13

I came of age as a painter when it was unpopular to take up the mantle of Mark Rothko and the Sublime.  Perhaps that is one of the reasons the path appealed to me, I've never been very good as a conformist; despite my best efforts,  I inevitably allow my contempt to show and then it's all out in the open.  But I think that one of the functions of art is to connect us to alternative realms of consciousness and shared experiences.

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.

tabula rasa

works in progress on the studio floor

There is nothing like working to opera in the studio.  The brick and wood bounce the sound and build it into epic phonic presence, and I have found myself lost in an entire opera without realizing it; all the time painting away in the zone.  I love the largeness of the medium.

As this year draws to a close I find myself considering a move to acrylic paint.  I've used oil exclusively for about 8 years now; I love so many nuances of the medium, -especially its unforgiving nature.  But there are times when my studio time is so limited, and for the sake of expediency I find myself wishing I could stay in a painting for longer at one sitting than I am able to with oil.

It won't be an inexpensive transition to be sure.  But I've found that changing one's medium often changes one's perspective and attack, and by doing so may drill down into the work to discover something fundamental about it.  I feel the need to do this for a bit.

I was out with my daughters the other day and found these 8" x 10" canvases and bought a pack of 10 on a whim.  I decided to try it and see what happened.  There are wonderful things about this work writ large, but there are equally compelling things about it small, so I'm opening myself to the exploration.  I can go buy another 10, some acrylic paint and essentially lose nothing but time.  As I heard an acquaintance say, "paint's never wasted."  It means if you embark on an honest creative exploration with integrity of idea and fullness of spirit, you do good work; even if the work itself fails, you have learned something, maybe opened something up.

It's been a amazing year for the work.  I go into 2013 strong and optimistic, and largely peaceful about life and art.  I'm not one for resolutions, but I hope to give less time and ear to the news about how messed up the world is and to spend that time making it better the only way I know how.

no fear of flying

The relations have left, the house is quiet and slowly getting back to order.  The tooth fairy is paying a double visit tonight.  The after-christmas crash hit with full force and all my wonderful girls are sleeping upstairs.

So damn much going on and so little I can talk about.  Breaking points have been reached, changes are being made, so it goes.  I've tried for years to compartmentalize my life; allowing some people access to some parts and others to an avatar persona I maintain for my day job.  I've realized that this can no longer be; that it sequesters the beautiful, true, powerful aspects of my soul and hides my work from the light of day.  That avatar will soon be dead; good riddance.   I cannot wait to be free of him.

The work in the studio is amazing and true and a painting sold from the Greenville condo model.  There's always that momentary affirmation after a sale, then you cash the check and go back to work and try to push the experience from your mind.  I want desperately to stay on the epic scale, -to make another 3 the same size as the previous ones.  I see it in my mind; all of them in a room, and it is profound.  But there is the pressure to work on a smaller scale, to make works for the smaller budget clients and when the dust settles after the New Year perhaps I will be able to see these options more clearly.

I booked my flight and hotel for NYC in March to see this artist's exhibition.  Just knowing I will be in the city so soon gives my soul wings at a time when I desperately need it.  There will be good art and good times with friends old and new.

I'm in the sweet spot of the calendar year; those days and nights between holidays where everything just feels suspended.   I've been flattening out the blacks on the two 5' x 4' canvases and I'm intrigued by the sense of downward drag of the composition in one of them.  There's something thematic going on, and I am trying to both understand it and not over-analyze it.

I'm attending an Icarus Session on January 2nd in Greenville.  Everything in my life feels as if it is moving toward significant and profound change.  As in art, I feel I don't know what is going to happen next...and I love it.

unknowing

I like not knowing what's going to happen.  You could say I thrive on uncertainty because that tension really energizes me in the studio.  The painting I am doing now has a quality of anxiety in a sublime sense of the word.  Not so much dread as uncertainty and looming transformation.  I saw Wim Wender's "Pina" the other night and felt so connected to her work because it really seemed to stem from a similar place as what is going on in my studio right now.  It feels as if the world is going mad, and yesterday when I got home there was a week-old NY Times opened to the arts section and I saw the most magnificent Matisse paintings and I felt, just for a moment, that the world is not fucked up and evil and twisted; it's just a little skewed and off course, and we need to focus on beauty and magnificence and perhaps begin to look at the unknown more as an encounter with the Divine and less as a menacing force of destruction and doom.

rough cut

studio wall, December 11th, 2012

Last night 'til the wee hours, continuing to pour and stream paint against the sweet blackness.  The forms always surprise me; references to the body, the sea, sky, and the ever-present otherness of what lives within us, always unseen.

I received good news this morning and even though I blabbed on Facebook I will keep it quiet here for now.  This isn't about that, this is about the work; the daily work.  Going home with paint under one's fingernails and exhausted and a nightcap and sitting and wondering about it all and how it all went down.  Painters paint.  So I put in the studio shifts when I'm tired and don't feel like it because tomorrow will bring its own set of obstacles.

work in progress, Rico '12

I am coming up on my 5 year anniversary in this studio.  Far and away the longest I've ever been in a studio and it's worn and weathered like a favorite tool that you instinctively reach for without considering.  You know its there and you know what it can do.  I'm fortunate to have made the rent for next year.

The good things, -the breaks, happen while you're busy doing the work and not thinking about it.  I've come to think that success surprises everyone every time it happens if they have half a soul.  The random phone call from you dealer while you're on your way through life and suddenly there's a moment of validation that you try to savor and summarily squash and move on with it.  It makes no sense; there's no figuring out what you did when or why someone liked it.  They could have just as easily ignored it, hated it or dismissed it.  It isn't you, no matter how much the ego wants you to believe it.  I've done this long enough to not confuse lucky with good, and to never dismiss being lucky.

The images in tonight's post are shorthand; rough cuts that enable me to get my first thoughts crystallized.  I'm loving where things are going.

reparations

It's late and there was paint laid down tonight and major surgery to the last large canvas.   The stretcher bars had dislodged from the weight and sheer unwieldiness of its size.  One had snapped and had to be fused.  In retrospect they needed two vertical cross braces and three horizontal.

All week I've been laying down the most amazing flat surfaces and since I took the large one off the wall I plan to flatten the blacks significantly.  It will float the white in interesting ways.

I have been thinking about a horizontal piece, -the first of this body of work.  I gessoed a page in a sketchbook and played with white oil paint straight out of the tube.  I'm looking for a black-paged sketchbook to facilitate my thought process right now.  I've been thinking of doing more drawing and works on paper to finish out the year.  I'll need to work through the horizontal orientation, but I'm thinking of a  78" x 216" painting in two panels.  I have it in my head and it won't let me rest.

Smoked a PDR maduro tonight and enjoyed the crisp autumn darkness.  The town has hung its Christmas lights and the whole of the square is lined in white illumination.  Family will soon start arriving and the semester's end is in sight, though I still have a long and stressful road up to the very last.

The work in the studio now seems inexhaustible, and this is a new experience for me; I tend to go from one thought to the next without concern or interest in consistency.  For the first time I feel I am building a body of work that is both personal and interesting for me in the long term.

This weekend will yield serious work, potentially something new as I learn from and respond to each new painting.  And as I write this now I am even thinking of different ratios for the paintings; much to consider as night turns to day again...

the Decembrist

December.  I've journeyed through the current body of work for this entire year; sometimes with clear vision and often being surprised.  Try as I might, I can't write about it yet, and perhaps that's why it is still interesting.  I have two more modest-sized canvases in the final stages of black surfacing but I find myself wanting to go even larger than the works that flank me in the photo above.

I'm always seeing things differently, and discovering things in the studio.  The one thing I have noticed over the years is that I oscillate between very etherial work and very painterly, visceral work.  Two aspects of self perhaps, or maybe as simple as I get bored with one and want to do the opposite.

I've been able to develop independently here in the middle of nowhere; had I been living for the last decade in Seattle, or Memphis or New York, I don't know that I would have reached the same conclusions as I have in this studio.  The sheer size of my studio here is unique and wonderful for someone at my career level.

I feel utterly rejected here in SC, and this is a source of much frustration.  And while I get acclaim from my peers on both coasts, that hasn't translated into representation or shows.  I don't want just an art dealer, I want a true believer.  Maybe that's too much to ask in this economy, or even in the current state of affairs of Art and it's relationship to money.

I foresee myself continuing to do this work through the next year, though it will undoubtably change.  I'm looking forward to the semester break and hoping for the unseasonably warm temperatures to continue.

once more to Winter

The cold has come, once again my bones ache with a longing for short nights and chance breezes.  Once more to Winter, once more to the tomb; portal to rebirth and regeneration.  There are canvases in stasis awaiting Mars black to breathe life into them before the impending hibernation.  The irony of my life to job ratio being that when I have the most time off I am least able to work in the studio because of climate.

The late Autumn winds do not bring bitterness.  I've long defeated that monster, despite my daily environment of higher education; a fertile field for such a world view.  I no longer plot escape from life, but rather expansion of those aspects of it which give instead of take.

My long weekend has been spent in the indulgence of reading; a luxury, I am sad to say, all too infrequent in the day-to-day rush and push.  I've been immersed in Shelley's Frankenstein, a wonderful tale of ambition, consequence and revenge.  I look forward to the semester break and unplugging for a sustained period of time and finding extended solace between pages.  On December 20th, I go off grid until the new year.

Reflection on the work this past year brings me much satisfaction.  The studio discipline is, -for me, the slow grind of work and discovery, work and discovery.  Work comes from work; I tend to dismiss the notion of inspiration as some magical lightening bolt.  I follow ideas in the studio.  I say yes to opportunities as they present themselves, and I've found this to be an equally successful strategy for life.  Gone are my worries about big, abstract concepts like success; success is doing the good work, scraped knuckles, paint beneath my fingernails the next morning.  Success is the laughter of my daughters in the next room, the stroll down the old church road across the street flanked by forest.  Success is the ability to travel to a dozen cities across the world and knowing I have friends to greet me there; perhaps those I haven't even met yet.

The new year will bring a Spring trip to NYC.  I will wander the streets and attend gatherings and spend my time surrounded by artists and thinkers, which will offer me profound respite from the daily life I lead.  I care not for pettiness and base ambitions and games to which they attend.  I pity those who seek only money and follow narrow life maps prescribed to them by others.  I've always opted to pull over and get out and wander.

I'll work today, do what I can to continue to smooth the surfaces on the wall.   I'll find strength in these tasks, joy in the application of my craft and satisfaction in the realization of my visions.   This body of work will be a flare, and my deepest hope is that someone will answer my call in the new year.