Richard Green

Richmond, IN
http://www.spindlepunk.com

I spend a lot of time watching paint dry which is fine because I consider myself to be, first and foremost, a painter. Experiments in drawing led me to tear paper and arrange found objects, lifting me off the paint surface into collage and assemblage. The arrival of furniture ‘shards’ seemed a natural extension of this process and allowed me to step outside the bounds of academic art. Recovered from alleys and yard sales, the chairs, tables and dressers introduce a human element to, otherwise, complex gestures. They represent a human scale with human references: arms, feet, legs, backs, seats and so on. An anthropomorphic whisper keens behind the work.

During a year spent teaching in Japan, I visited ancient Kyoto several times and loved the wooden artifacts of rice cultivation–splintered and gray–honored in retirement, placed around the wood-and-paper houses, sometimes mounted on the exterior as decoration. The ‘Kyoto’ series with its layered wooden designs owes its origins to this memory. ‘Debris Fields’ differ in that they are created from just one fractured furniture piece, making them bolder, simpler, and more colorful.

. . . which brings us back to the paint. Except for the base coat and a rare touch with a brush, the paint is poured and sprayed; it flows and drools and cracks and oozes. You’d think it would add a chaotic element. Quite the contrary, the paint imposes order while charging the pieces chromatically and emotionally; it creates harmonies or contrasts that give depth to the human gestures.