Shaun Richards Interview: Women and Children First

Homecoming

Above: The Bachelorette

Tonight Shaun Richards’ Show: Women and Children First opens at the new Flander’s location, 302 West Street at 6PM. One of Raleigh’s rising stars, we talked to Richards about where he’s been, the work he’s showing tonight and the new work hes creating at his current residency in Omaha at Bemis Center.

I met Shaun Richards during his residency at Artspace.  His studio space was stuffed to the gills with paintings on all sorts of surfaces from canvas to ripped cardboard panels.  It was back at the beginning of New Raleigh, we had dreams of a video wrap up of every First Friday, so I proceeded to ask 50 questions about who he was, what he was doing and how he got into it. That interview is long history, but since then Richards has continued to mature into one of the strongest young artists producing in the Triangle. The work has shown a continuous progression towards a unique vision, one that is based on referencing other media and building narrative around the current culture.

In October Richards left Raleigh for Omaha in a prestigious 3 month residency at the Bemis Center of Contemporary Arts. One of 24 artists, picked from hundreds, he received a modest stipend to come live and work in Omaha for 3 months to focus on his art.  No stranger to the struggle of making ends meet, Richards has spent the last two months in this residency working on a new body of work.

This week Richards returns to Raleigh with his first show in almost 18 months to show the work from the past year.  The artist brings a huge set of 25 pieces drawing on mythic archetypes and gender roles and then presenting them in frantic moments suspended in colorspace.  Half of the pieces are medium (3x 3 feet ) to large (6 x8 feet) and the other half are between 8x10 inches to 24 x 24 inches.  To say the least, a huge body of work representing a relentless commitment by the artist to produce. 

NR: You went to New York, and then your returned to NC. What drove this decision?

I moved to New York in 2003 to participate in a grad program at SUNY-Empire State called The Studio Semester Program.  I was a non-matriculated grad student for three semesters. The program afforded me studio space in Manhattan, along with weekly studio visits and crits with visiting artists, curators, and critics.  It was the cheapest deal in New York as far graduate study, but they didn’t offer an MFA.  They offered a MLSA which I wasn’t interested in.  After 3 semesters they gave me the ultimatum: matriculate or else.  I chose else.  then I spent the next year a and half dealing with the real world of NY City: job search, scrapping by.  I found a job with a commercial art company.  I did that for almost a year, then I got my 1099 from them and I’d made 18k.  It was a wake up call.  I had not worked on my art in about a year, and was barely getting by so I made the decision to get back to my art, and to move to a city where I had a few friends and the cost of living was more manageable.

Fetching

NR: I think a lot of your work is about Women and their different roles. Can you talk a bit about that?

With this group of work particularly and this show as I was developing it I sort of noticed reoccurring themes dealing with women and children and whether it just be women as mothers and raising children versus women’s place in the world and how they were looked at in religion. And The Bachelorette with that piece I was trying to make fun of this idea of love that we are sort of marketed and the title specifically talks about reality TV shows like The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. When I was sort of drawing up the painting, because there are a ton of layers there, that painting took five months and I thought it would take two.  I just sort of kept reworking over things and sanding things away. So the idea started to make fun of this idea of love; reality shows, diamond commercials, romantic comedies, high school sweethearts that sort of thing.

The figures in the background the woman holding back the man whose whipping the, it looks like a boy, it’s actually Mars chastising cupid from a painting by Bartolomeo Manfredi. It’s Venus, it’s her son, Mars is chastising him for making him fall in love with his mother.  So there’s a whole weird dynamic alone in that mythology. Laughs So I gave an art talk here (Idaho) recently and someone asked me about that. It’s sort of, like, I think a couple of things were on my mind at the time that I wasn’t aware of at the time. See I was watching Mad Men, and I just couldn’t believe the gender roles. And from everything I have read it’s pretty accurate. Combined with my own, there is um, definitely some autobiographical things with the vacancy of women as leaders in my growing up. Maybe that makes women more central in my work.

NR: One of the things that really surprises me is that you are taking a Renaissance painting of Roman Mythology and in your piece it takes on a rustic, rural feeling to it. Like a lot of your work. And then you surround them with the peacocks, I imagine there’s something literal about that.

There is a literal use of the peacocks, in the sense that its one of the most flamboyant examples of the nature of use of plummage to attract a mate.  Also I don’t know if you are familiar with The Game, a book by Neil Gaiman that talks about pickup artists?  They use that as a verb, as in Peacocking to describe how you dress to attract the opposite sex.  So there is a continual play on that.

The 4 Horsemen

NR: The 4 Horsemen piece, I guess there are multiple pieces with cowboys, there is this Americana theme. 

For the group of work, that was one of the last paintings, I started in October and November (08). That was one of the things that came up in January or Februrary to do those 4 Horsemen. It was the last painting I finished.  It sort of raised the alarmism a little bit. It sort of puts the stamp of alarmism on the whole show. The Women and Children First apocalyptic idea.

It’s kind of tounge-in-cheek, I had this idea of these four horsemen, it was these four massive cowboys wandering passively through this static of everyday news today.  I didn’t want to get too literal with the sort of biblical interpretation, where each one is a different color and a different vein of something, really one of them is a combination of all of them. I don’t know if you have read, but I think one is pestilence, one is war, one is death maybe, anyway, I guess that is sort of it. 

NR: So when you reference these concepts, the mythology, is that something you research? Are they stories you know that you are seeing in the real world?

It’s kind of a combination, I guess I should talk about process. I play word games.  I had used the cowboy earlier and I was thinking about the Mayan calendar and signs of the apocalypse.  Things that are odd and newsworthy. So I play these word games and sometimes it’s inspired by something I have read or a news piece i have seen online.  The Wet American Dream painting is a billboard silhouette and it makes up the silhouette with collage from pinups from Playboy and Hustler. Centerfolds is simply a blunt statement about sex and advertising and marketing. That was inspired by an article I read in Newsweek close to that period of time.  One of those phrases I wrote down, the title was The Porning of America and how stripper culture and porn culture was filtering into popular culture through pop music; Brittney Spears and Christina Agulera and Miley Cyrus. And how it is filtering into our teens. It came from that and became a different interpretation with sex and marketing.  So there is kind of an analytical design period, if that makes sense.

The Bachelorette the whole thing was covered in yearbook pages and its one of those things where as I’m working on the painting, the idea kind of evolves and things get lost from what I set out to do. And with the Wasp painting, I finally came up with a title, I don’t know if you got it, it’s called Fetching. It is this weird [laughs] reflection on women as powerful and not in sex as they hold that kind of power, the background board is an allusion to Ms. Pacman. At one time there was this, I put on this little Ms. Pacman sort of roaming through there, and it looked stupid, so I took it away. So its like “women hold the cards” sort of an assertion, which is why I think Mad Men struck me so much. Mothers and Wives and these powerful elements of these ideas of role-modeling and socializing. 

NR: Tell me about the Bemis Center and your opportunity there.

It’s kind of like a big award. I was surprised to get it. I apply for a number of things and don’t get them, grants and fellowships. This is a big one in the US. I don’t think there’s anyone that gives you the sort of time this place gives, as well as a stipend, you are fully supported. Just come here for a chunk of time and invest yourself and not worry about the day to day because you’re not in your day to day. You know, moving away from where you live and your friends and your job, so in that way and then I got here and I couldn’t believe how nice it is. I’m living in an art museum, in a former art museum, I have 2300 square feet, living quarters attached, I have a bed, a full kitchen and a bathroom in the same studio.

We can come and go as we please. We don’t have any obligations.  They had a meeting with me the first week I was here and they said “We’re just here to facilitate. You can sit up there for 3 months and look at the wall for all we care, we are just giving you the opportunity.” I was just like “Awesome” you know?  I don’t have to spend some hours down there I don’t have to do anything except make some work. And that’s up to me if I make it or not. But, I don’t know what else to say about Omaha, it feels like an reward.  Some recognition, and the number of artists who have been here, it’s pretty who’s who.  It was founded in 1981, Christo and Jean Claude are on the board.

NR: Is it harder or easier to create work there?

Well, the last year I worked so hard, I was working probably an average of 60 hours a week, and that includes my 25, 28 hours a week at Poole’s. So basically, it was like studio day, Poole’s night, studio day, Poole’s night. And I would have two days off to spend all day in my studio.  I think Fourth of July we were closed for the week and I couldn’t believe how much I got done, because I had always had these little six hour increments, versus having a full twelve hours for a week. So I could spend 8, 10, 12 hours at a time. So everyone keeps making these remarks about how fast I work and I don’t feel like I am working that fast. I feel like I have the time to do it in the space. Like I said, the space is incredible. 14 foot ceilings, 2300 square feet. I’ve got two 5x7 paintings and then two 9x11 and one that’s 8 x 10. So I’m just blowing things up. One of the pieces I’m super excited about.  I’m doing this car crash series here, or starting it.  I wanted to do a reflection on the auto industry especially after the last year with the economy and the bailouts. I was going to loosely title it Crash. It is going to be these big car crash paintings. and they were kind of of interest just for the painting possibilities, they can be really aggressively painted.  Graphic and aggressive.  And compared to what I have done over the last year, they would be way more masculine, I have been covering the kids and women.  Which is totally one of those things you sort of notice after a while. Looking back and its sort of all about women and children and role-modeling. It’s moving into this greater American culture, consumer culture and advertising and movies. Sort of violent movies, there’s a lot of directions it could go, drunk driving and you know vast landfills consumer waste.

Catch Shaun Richards premier tonight at Flanders gallery, 302 S. West St.

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