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CW: How did you begin to incorporate the geological aspects into your work? RR: I've always been interested in geology. I took a class
when I was in college and I had been interested in textbook diagrams
of plate tectonics. [Around] 1998 I had been working more abstractly,
with less imagery. I was interested in using symbols in the work
but I steered away from recognizable imagery, for the most part.
In 1999, I was working on a series of paintings and a flood of
imagery started happening in the work. It was immediate…symbols
I needed to put in the painting. All of a sudden I had this revelation
that I don't need to coin myself this or that, label myself abstract.
I thought this is something I'm interested in why not put a diagram
in the painting and see where it goes? When I started to put imagery in the painting it was a natural progression for me to think about putting a diagram in the painting and being more pictorial and more literal. It spoke out to me as a metaphor for our lives and for our relationships with people and the things that go on underneath the surface. I got excited about the idea of the volatility of nature being a metaphor for the personal. Painting has always been an emotional outlet for me and in a way the geologic structured diagrams in the painting impose structure into what was before a soup of paint on my canvas. CW: Has it been a grounding force in your life because it seems… RR: It's a humbling force in my life. It keeps me in check. When I was in the Rockies last summer taking a hike and learning about the fact that I'm walking on a mountain that was formed by organisms from 500 million years ago; it's a little humbling. It puts me in my place, this whole other scale of time. CW: How did this body of work begin? What inspired this new direction? RR: In the paintings I had been doing the past few years
I had imposed certain I felt a real urge for making every painting be distinctive in terms of palette. So I set off on my residency and started this series with the decision that each painting would begin with a field of color that was different from the last and in certain paintings limit the palette to certain colors: each painting would have a very distinctive palette. When I was in Banff I met with a regional geologist who lent me a lot of materials on the specific geologic story of the Rockies. He lent me a lot of topographical maps that connected together to form a really large map of the region showing all the rock layers by age. They were beautiful in their own right; as gorgeous striations of color. I had that up on the wall in my studio and it was really inspiring the whole time I was there. CW: Now was that something that had been building up because the work in the Fleischer Challenge Show started to signal more color being used? RR: Yes, I think the color started to get more saturated in those paintings but again I was still working with that formula of the colors on the white background, white field. CW: The colors felt like they wanted to come up and out of… RR: Yes, and all of a sudden…I think what had happened was that when I was in Banff doing this residency and the quality of the light there was just incredible. It was a very crisp, sunny, intense light and because it was so far north it was light out from 5 or 6 in the morning until 11 o'clock at night. It was just incredibly intense and I really responded to that. I started incorporating silk-screen and working with acrylics versus oil. I think the combination of them lent itself to a more graphic…basically the color and the intensity of light in Banff is what really … CW: Started the color… RR: Inspired the color but the graphic quality of these was inspired by starting to use silkscreen. Starting to use acrylic and working with paint differently: kind of being more hard-edged and graphic. CW: The thing I wanted to bring up about the silk-screen is that the paintings in this series feel very light and airy. There is a sense of humor to them. Do you think its personal development or the process of silk-screening being something between you and the surface of the canvas that has allowed you to step back and have a little more breathing room? RR: I think there were touches of humor in my earlier work but I agree that these do have a much lighter, more whimsical quality to them and I think that has everything to do with my own state of mind and where I am at, personally and being comfortable enough with the medium of painting to take more risks and sort of experiment. CW: Is that where the silk-screen becomes involved? RR: Yes, I think so. I've been working with a lot of textbook diagrams and maps and thought to myself, what is the purpose of replicating? Originally my thought about using silkscreen stemmed from the fact that I was incorporating a lot of diagrams and mapping into the work and thought maybe it would be interesting to keep the diagrammatic feeling but not have my hand in the way by actually silk-screening the diagram. However, it really unfolded itself into something much bigger than that because I'm silk-screening my digital images and drawings into the paintings. I'm experimenting with a lot of other ways of putting paint on the canvas in this series, in addition to silk-screen. Whether it is stencils I create or squeegeeing paint out of a tube onto the canvas or painting with a brush, a palette knife. It's just another way for me to transfer paint onto the canvas; an expanding tool. It has also allowed me to vary the kind of lines I can put on the painting. I can do extremely fine hair line diagrams that would never translate onto the canvas with a paintbrush. CW: But in the past you have… RR: In the past I attempted to but it was clear it was my hand. I like the idea of mechanical versus the hand and having that… CW: Dynamic in the work? RR: Yes. The same thing with the geologic diagrams in the first place: the structure versus emotion and also the intellect versus emotion. It's all about juxtaposition. For instance, I'll make something very cartoonish next to something more diagrammatical against something that is more rendered. Another thing with the silk-screen is that I'm using it in nonconventional way in that I'm not running editions. In fact, I never use a silk-screen image in two paintings. It may be used in a multiple way within one painting but not outside of that painting; it's using printmaking in a monoprint way. The other thing I like to play on in the work is a variety of
vantage points. One CW: What effect does being a graphic designer have on your work? RR: I actually think that I've kept my design life and my painting life very separate until this body of work. It's one of the things that I'm personally excited about. CW: It's very obvious. How important is that dialog? RR: I kept them very separate because I felt like the design was something I did very clean. I even did collage on the computer but it was a very clean way of doing things. Painting was more hands on but I think what has happened is this body of work is a sort of embracing the fact that, yes; I do work in graphic design! I've happily allowed myself to enter these elements into my work. It has also affected the way I think about the surface of the canvas, in relation to commercial printing techniques. For example, you can spot varnish certain parts of a printed piece and see how it highlights those areas: I've started to do this in my paintings rather than having a uniform surface. I'm playing with a printing technique in my paintings. The other way I think the design element has infiltrated my paintings is in using certain programs like Photoshop and Illustrator. I've been using them in some ways to output the silk-screen imagery. It's the first time I'm embracing my computer skills with my ability to create imagery and then output them from the computer as a silk-screen image for the painting. CW: Going back to the lightness of the work, the word you
used was 'whimsical," RR: Actually, I feel like they are more labored because I'm incorporating things like…that group of shoes, [ in crazy for you ] which took hours and hours to paint. I think the reason they have…what was the word you used to describe… CW: More of a light… RR: I thought you had said energy because my process has changed a lot and in a way the paintings are more refined than the earlier work. I actually think that each aspect of them is probably more labored than my earlier work. CW: Why is that? RR: Well there is not just silk-screening. All of them probably encompass one silk-screen image but there are many parts of the paintings that are more rendered than what I was doing previously, which had a looser, more painterly quality. So, in a way, these are more labored and intense to create because they have more rendering in them. However, I think one of the reasons they have a light, whimsical quality is because it looks like I had fun making them. CW: Yes, that's what I'm getting at, exactly. RR: This whole body of work sprung from the residency I was doing in Canada. It was a month where I had nothing to do but paint and it was so refreshing! I really felt an energy there and it might have been because it's light out until 11 o'clock at night and also where I was, personally. I harnessed that energy and put everything I had into these paintings. I've really tried to continue that energy in the work since returning. CW: How do you determine the scale of your work? RR: These paintings are much more graphic and not so much about the gesture. So I felt like a smaller scale would be more appropriate. They have smaller moments within the paint and more tightly rendered moments within the work. It's a more personal and intimate scale to the paintings. Previously, I had been drawn to that 66 x 66" scale, which is actually my body span. The paintings were very much related to my body and to a more painterly, gestural motion. At the moment, I'm not intending to go bigger than 48 x 48." The way I'm working now doesn't lend itself to the bigger scale. CW: How did you decide on the square format? RR: I've been working in a square format for a long time: I choose the square because of its neutrality. If you do a vertical orientation the association is, generally, a portrait. The association with the horizontal is landscape. Initially, I was painting abstractly and didn't want there to be an association with either landscape or portraiture. I wanted to have a neutral format. I also find it really challenging to work in the square format and come up with a composition that is dynamic and has enough tension. CW: Do you think the emphasis on the color will continue? RR: It's hard to say what will happen but I feel like color is one of the important ways I express myself. I see no reason to limit that. CW: In the beginning pieces you would never have known that to be a strong point for you because it wasn't emphasized. RR: Prior to the white series I was working in very saturated colors. The white was actually a departure from using color. [The new paintings] touch back on other times in my artistic development. Not only the saturated color but with rendering images and having more illustrative moments to the work. It's something I did way back and now it's coming back. In a way, these paintings are a nice bridge. From both a content standpoint point and stylistically it feels like a merging of old and new. CW: I remember when we first talked about your new paintings and we were looking at slides. Initially, I looked past the colors and responded to the space you allowed to remain in dreaming of hoodoos and emerald skies. In all of them there was less of a claustrophobic quality, less "weighty." Was it the color and light in Banff that inspired the space? RR: I feel like working with different mediums has really opened doors for me and allowed me to think differently about the space. A year ago I would never have allowed there to be a solid blank field of blue like that. I would have tried to fill it up somehow. I'm enjoying having moments of more intensity in the paintings, more dense moments, and then letting there be really open ones. One of the four foot paintings is almost made entirely of a field of pale green. There is an economy of information and a much more open feeling to it. I think part of that is working with acrylic and wood panels. It has allowed for a smooth, flat surface that I didn't achieve with oil paint. I'm responding to the flatness and wanting there to be fields of color. CW: Did you begin to use acrylic out of necessity or by design? RR: Initially, I wanted to do silk-screen but I did not want to work with oil-based silk-screen. It's a nightmare! I wanted to use acrylic so that I could experiment and another reason was because I was shipping these paintings and was concerned about them drying. I thought [in Banff] it would be the perfect opportunity to try something new. CW: Do you have more control over the acrylic colors? RR: I don't think I have any more control over the colors than I did with [oil colors.] I'm enjoying the increased drying speed because I can layer it quickly and it doesn't get muddy; it's not wet into wet. It has become somewhat cleaner for me to work in acrylic but I'm still able to allow the underlying surfaces to come through. I'm really able to layer a painting. It has affected my process in a positive way. CW: How did you get the blue in let's take a trip together so juicy? RR: Well the turquoise and the emerald were inspired by the glacial lakes in the Canadian Rockies. They have "rock flour" in them, which is the finest form of rock sediment, and it basically absorbs all the color of the spectrum except for this emerald, which it reflects. You'd be in this beautiful setting with all these ice-capped mountains and you'd see this, literally, emerald colored lake and it was just unbelievable that it was a natural color. CW: How personal do you want your paintings to be, in terms of the viewer's response? You put a lot of yourself, metaphorically, into the paintings. How much do you want to reveal and how much do you want to conceal? RR: I think that there are certain ambiguities in the work. I'm not telling my whole life story but they are autobiographical and narrative. I am an emotional person and respond to things emotionally and I want to have that conveyed in the work. I think through the juxtaposition of personal symbols interwoven into the painting and through the titles, which are, generally, very personal or more emotive than not that I invite the viewer…would hope that the viewer could feel that they were personal. CW: To what degree? What if someone pointed something specific out in the painting that was not necessarily something you would want them to know? RR: I put my heart and my soul into the painting and whatever comes out, comes out. I'm not saying for myself how much the viewer is going to get from this about me; it's not really how I make the paintings. I'm not expecting the viewer to understand all of it in terms of knowing what certain things mean in the painting. I am open to them interpreting it in their own way. They're extremely personal and symbolic but they're not too specific. It's exposing to put something you create on the wall to begin with but I'm not too worried about it. I don't make the paintings thinking about it. CW: I guess what I'm getting at is, for instance, someone will put things out there and dangle it in front of people and I'm curious as to where you stand on that? RR: Working abstract expressionistically was very vague and ambiguous and I think that over the years I've become more specific, more overt in the work, in terms of putting myself out there. Like painting all these shoes [in crazy for you,] that's more specific than I've been in a long time in a painting. CW: Where do you stand in terms of being revelatory and exhibitionism? RR: I take no issue with someone being an exhibitionist in their work: to each their own. I don't think about that when I'm making the painting. I am a sexual person, it's a part of my life but I would question putting something in my work that was more suggestive. Am I going to put a strap-on dildo in my painting? Probably not! I am right where I need to be.
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