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artist: RICHARD DANA
more work by Richard Dana
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Washingtonart interviewed Richard Dana in July 2004, as he returned from a trip to South Africa, and was preparing work for several shows beginning in early 2005. washingtonart: Richard, your art career has taken you to a lot of different countries. Over time, have these foreign cultures had an influence on the direction of your work? Richard Dana : I would say that my travels to other countries have had a significant indirect influence on my work, but in only a few specific instances a direct impact. Well before I started traveling for art exhibits and projects I had a very universal set of antennae which picked up visual music from cultures around the globe, both historical and contemporary. Being a self-taught artist, my schooling was through the absorption of imagery and aesthetics from museums and books on art, architecture, other cultures and so on. You might say, to mix a metaphor, that I have been a vacuum cleaner, with universally sensitive antennae, sucking up images into my cranium where they are blended and stored for later use. washingtonart: Can you give some example of specific kinds of influence from specific places? Richard Dana: As I create any given series of work I can't say that it is directly influenced by this or that culture. Certain tendencies in my art, however, have definitely been reinforced by my travels. I have a great interest in patterning, and that was given new inspiration by Uzbek tapestries and Moroccan henna designs. My inclination toward bright colors was given further impetus by trips to Brazil and Senegal. My appreciation of mass and volume was reinforced by the historical architecture of Rome and Egypt. And a conviction to make "edgy" art was strengthened in Germany by seeing so much good art of this nature and talking with German artists. washingtonart: what is the process by which all these impressions and ideas make their way into your work? Richard Dana: Generally my creative process is rather indirect or, perhaps one could say, subliminal My work is a reflection of an amalgam of thoughts, impressions and imagery. And, even as I have an extremely analytical bent and can come up with an explanation for just about everything (whether correct or not), I try not to examine, or deconstruct, my creative process too much. I try to adhere as much as possible to the Beat Poets' philosophy of: "First thought - best thought". I never sit down in front of a blank canvas and think that now I must incorporate an image from a specific culture or country. As a means of moving forward on a given work, however, I will often look through piles of accumulated sketches, photos or printed imagery for a direction to move toward. As I often sketch and photograph in my travels, and then review the growing pile of these, and other, visual documents at various points in the creative process, impressions and ideas gained from my travels are without a doubt creeping into my work and manifesting themselves in altered form. washingtonart: Can you talk alittle bit about your recent series of double images--both in terms of imagery and also the whole concept of the series. Richard Dana: That series was created for an exhibition in Brazil and is called the Duality Series. It came about because, in thinking about what to do for this exhibition, I decided to play around a bit more explicitly with a theme that has been present in much of my work for the past several years. The theme concerns dualities, which I had previously been addressing in various ways somewhat obliquely. I decided to see if i could represent dualities a bit more directly using pairs of iconographic images. As it turned out, some of these pairs are rather direct, but some remain a bit oblique. So what do I mean about "dualities? Pretty basic issues facing anyone, such as: emotion and reason; sacred and profane; spirit and flesh; spontaneity and order; female and male; abstract and concrete; life and death. But, in the "Duality Series" and others, even as I might identify these black and white poles of existence in my mind, as it were, I'm much more interested in trying to depict the more colorful gray regions in between the poles, where humans actually live and wrestle with these dualities. washingtonart: What is your working process in creating these pieces? Richard Dana: In fact, the process by which I create my paintings directly reflects my interest in duality. I typically start with a surface such as wood, canvas or paper in a horizontal position. On this surface, using a wide variety of media and "nonpainting" techniques I will create an abstract ground in as spontaneous, as physical, as nonthinking a way as possible. When I have created an abstract ground I like I will then position it vertically and begin thinking about what representational image I will paint into it. Thus, the work itself is a combination of abstract and representational created in both a more spontaneous and a more orderly fashion. washingtonart: Is there any kind of a story specific to any of the pieces? For example the piece called "Mother and Son" Richard Dana: I wasn't really creating a story, in a narrative sense, with any of the works in the Duality Series. In developing imagery for the series I was more interested in creating an iconography which both represents dualities and presents interesting formal, or visual, interactions between the individual "icons". Works such as "Him and Her" or "Night and Day" are more obvious representations of dualities. The ideas which I was consciously playing with in a work such as "Mother and Son" are more complex, or at least less obvious. The top image, based on a traditional African carving of a horned animal, represent "Mother Nature", if you will, while the bottom image represents humankind, bowing in subservience and homage to the large force from which we all came. A further twist on this relationship might be that we all came from Africa originally. washingtonart: What about the work "Give and Take" ? Richard Dana: That also addresses Nature. Nature provides, as symbolized by the pear on the left, and we, Nature's creatures, take, as symbolized by the bird on the right. Also using Nature-derived imagery, although perhaps less philosophically and more playfully, things get a bit more convoluted with a work like "Shark and Gourd". The shark form represents sea, and the gourd form represents earth. The dominent colors of the work, blue and "earthy" yellows and browns, are to further suggest the duality of sea and land. And a bit like "Give and Take", there is a devourer and a "devouree". Finally, the shape of the shark and gourd mirror each other for formal and philosophical reasons. washingtonart: Richard, what are you working on nowadays? Are you preparing for any shows? Richard Dana: Yup, I am preparing for a couple of exhibitions. Early next year I have a solo exhibition at Tribes Gallery in New York which will feature several aspects of my "black and white" work. In January, 2006, I'm having an even more comprehensive survey of my "black and white" work at the Tremaine Gallery, which is at the Hotchkiss School (Connecticut) and is quite large. I guess I haven't really talked about this "black and white work. It is mostly drawings on paper, but also includes collage and painting. It ranges from 9x15 foot pieces to 6x6 inch. I also use a variety of formats in presenting the work, some of the more unusual ones being large-scale scrolls, freestanding installations and pieces made up of literally hundreds of small black plastic octagons which individually frame even smaller drawings and collectively form huge patterns on the wall. In between these two exhibitions I'll be in a group show at the Pretoria Art Museum, in South Africa, in May, 2005. This show is actually part of an ongoing international project entitled Take me To The River which I took part in organizing and which will also feature a community outreach component. I'll most likely be exhibiting big paintings for this show. Other than that, it's always a question of trying to carve out as much time as possible to work undisturbed in the studio. washingtonart: Thank you, Richard, it will be great to see your new work!
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Images
from Richard Dana's black & white series,
Images
from Richard Dana's
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