R I C H A R D P R A T T ON VIEW
Somerhill Gallery / Durham, North Carolina
N E W P A I N T I N G S & E X H I B I T I O N S AN INTERVIEW with Richard Pratt
by the Somerhill Gallery
Where did you grow up and when did you start making art (non-professionally & professionally)?
I was born in Gainesville, Georgia and lived there until I was fourteen. We then moved to East Tennessee. I remember drawing a lot with Bic ballpoint pens on paper, primarily pictures of buildings, elevations and blueprints, but landscapes and faces, too. I think that making art was a way for me to expand the world around me and claim some of it as mine. We lived in a small house, hence my interest in architecture.
I didn’t have any formal art classes until high school and nothing was really taught about the history of art. I remember subscribing to the Time-Life series of books about artists and reading and treasuring them in high school (Van Gogh, Rubens, Rembrandt, Cezanne, Matisse, etc.).
My high school art teacher, Martha Wright, was wonderful. She offered a free evening class in painting that I attended as a senior. I remember her laughing at some of my efforts and teaching us to relax about it all.
I have for a long time identified myself with being an artist, but it wasn’t until I later dropped out of graduate school with very definite ideas in my head about the paintings that I wanted to make, that I started becoming a professional.
What degree(s) do you have and how important was it to your development?
I have a B. A. in Art History from the University of Tennessee and studied Art History on the graduate level at New York University. I was a bit unusual for an Art History major in that I took far more than the required minimum number of studio courses in painting and drawing than some of the other students did. I still think that a hands-on approach to history through making art helps a historian better understand artists and what they do.
I loved the studio courses that I took, and perhaps since I was majoring in something other than art making, there was less pressure on me as an artist. I had more than one art teacher suggest that I switch to pursuing a Fine Arts degree, but I liked the broad background that a study of history gave me. I continue to read books on art and artists all the time and part of my studio is a library of art books and magazines. I especially appreciate books that give me an intimate picture of the day-to-day studio practice of other artists.
I should also mention that the history of architecture was a big part of my university education. I think that my sense of form and balance in composition comes from architecture, and many of paintings over the years have included references to or depictions of buildings.
What is the medium you use and why?
It is a mystery to me why I began to paint with acrylics. I think that I quite possibly purchased an attractive how-to book as a teenager and later asked for paints and brushes for Christmas. I know that I was using acrylic paint in my high school painting class, so that would have been thirty plus years ago.
A painter’s technique is like a writer’s voice. It develops over time. An artist’s means --- the tools and medium he puts to use --- are closely linked to his pictorial intentions. It is difficult for me to tell which is the cart and which is the horse, the means or the intentions. It has been said before that painters only paint subjects that their individual means will allow them to paint, so in a way, without being negative, artists are self-limiting in what they do and herein lies the artist’s individuality and style.
Acrylic paint is fast drying and wonderfully suitable for painting the clearly defined, flat areas of color that I incorporate into all of my paintings. I paint almost exclusively with flat-edged brushes after carefully mixing individual colors. Since there is no illusionary gradation of forms in my paintings, the tonal relationships between these areas of color are important to making the painting work. The narrow areas of paint that remain between these forms create lines in a process that is almost the reverse of drawing.
Acrylic paint, flat brushes, stretched canvas, colored pencils, rulers and compasses are my primary tools, but time is an important element, too. My relationship with a project over several weeks is a major component of my process.
by the Somerhill Gallery
Where did you grow up and when did you start making art (non-professionally & professionally)?
I was born in Gainesville, Georgia and lived there until I was fourteen. We then moved to East Tennessee. I remember drawing a lot with Bic ballpoint pens on paper, primarily pictures of buildings, elevations and blueprints, but landscapes and faces, too. I think that making art was a way for me to expand the world around me and claim some of it as mine. We lived in a small house, hence my interest in architecture.
I didn’t have any formal art classes until high school and nothing was really taught about the history of art. I remember subscribing to the Time-Life series of books about artists and reading and treasuring them in high school (Van Gogh, Rubens, Rembrandt, Cezanne, Matisse, etc.).
My high school art teacher, Martha Wright, was wonderful. She offered a free evening class in painting that I attended as a senior. I remember her laughing at some of my efforts and teaching us to relax about it all.
I have for a long time identified myself with being an artist, but it wasn’t until I later dropped out of graduate school with very definite ideas in my head about the paintings that I wanted to make, that I started becoming a professional.
What degree(s) do you have and how important was it to your development?
I have a B. A. in Art History from the University of Tennessee and studied Art History on the graduate level at New York University. I was a bit unusual for an Art History major in that I took far more than the required minimum number of studio courses in painting and drawing than some of the other students did. I still think that a hands-on approach to history through making art helps a historian better understand artists and what they do.
I loved the studio courses that I took, and perhaps since I was majoring in something other than art making, there was less pressure on me as an artist. I had more than one art teacher suggest that I switch to pursuing a Fine Arts degree, but I liked the broad background that a study of history gave me. I continue to read books on art and artists all the time and part of my studio is a library of art books and magazines. I especially appreciate books that give me an intimate picture of the day-to-day studio practice of other artists.
I should also mention that the history of architecture was a big part of my university education. I think that my sense of form and balance in composition comes from architecture, and many of paintings over the years have included references to or depictions of buildings.
What is the medium you use and why?
It is a mystery to me why I began to paint with acrylics. I think that I quite possibly purchased an attractive how-to book as a teenager and later asked for paints and brushes for Christmas. I know that I was using acrylic paint in my high school painting class, so that would have been thirty plus years ago.
A painter’s technique is like a writer’s voice. It develops over time. An artist’s means --- the tools and medium he puts to use --- are closely linked to his pictorial intentions. It is difficult for me to tell which is the cart and which is the horse, the means or the intentions. It has been said before that painters only paint subjects that their individual means will allow them to paint, so in a way, without being negative, artists are self-limiting in what they do and herein lies the artist’s individuality and style.
Acrylic paint is fast drying and wonderfully suitable for painting the clearly defined, flat areas of color that I incorporate into all of my paintings. I paint almost exclusively with flat-edged brushes after carefully mixing individual colors. Since there is no illusionary gradation of forms in my paintings, the tonal relationships between these areas of color are important to making the painting work. The narrow areas of paint that remain between these forms create lines in a process that is almost the reverse of drawing.
Acrylic paint, flat brushes, stretched canvas, colored pencils, rulers and compasses are my primary tools, but time is an important element, too. My relationship with a project over several weeks is a major component of my process.
Click HERE to view the VIDEO INTERVIEW with Richard Pratt
"I prefer to see ideas and emotions
not as the content of my works,
but as part of the reaction
the viewer will have to them."
"I prefer to see ideas and emotions
not as the content of my works,
but as part of the reaction
the viewer will have to them."
What inspired you to make these particular works?
The paintings in this show were all painted within the last four years. It has been said that paintings resemble each other far more closely than an individual painting resembles anything in the real world. This is certainly true of my work.
Inspiration for me is a simple process of noticing some part of the world around me that will translate into my language of painting. That means that close observation or study don’t really enter into the process. Something simply strikes me as formally interesting and is lifted out of the world and into the painting.
Often preconceptions are more personal and intentional. I began four years ago with the idea of creating a series of paintings that were not strictly cloned one from the other, but linked to each other like generations in a family through the use of a non-symbolic, repeated element, a disk-like, abstract circle. The disk served as a protagonist or presence in each painting without placing any narrative demands on the viewer. The motif also allowed me to explore abstractly representational images as well as completely non-representational ones.
More recently, trees have become the protagonists in my paintings. They have a quality of gesture and stance that is similar to the human figure without the drama or attitude that a figure might suggest. There is a theme running through many recent paintings that subtly contrasts the natural world with the manmade environment.
What do you feel they are trying to say?
With a lot of my paintings, the viewer may experience a sense of calm that approaches blankness. The artist isn’t giving too much away, and that allows the viewer to interpret the painting in his or her own manner. Hearing what other people have to say is part of my enjoyment of my work.
I was recently pondering why the words “expression” and “expressiveness” annoyed me whenever artists or critics used them. I decided that I preferred to see ideas and emotions not as the content of my works, but as part of the reaction the viewer will have to them. I remember a painting that I did during college in my parents’ garage. It depicted part of a Coke machine, the part where the bottles came out. I remember being amazed by how it looked and I had a strong, almost hormonal, reaction to the image. The painting itself “expressed” very little.
It intrigues me that an artist is as much a viewer of his finished work as anyone else is. My simple formal preconceptions for a painting come to be cluttered with ideas during the process of painting and well beyond the point when the painting is actually finished and hanging on a wall. My ideas about my use of pattern, multiple canvas panels, disks, towers, trees and fence posts were all more clearly defined after the process of using them in my work.
I love to paint, and by that I mean the physical act of painting. I often think that the simple composition that I use as a starting point for a painting is just the scaffolding that supports the act. At the end of the process there is an image that satisfies or intrigues the viewer.
Paintings serve a wonderful function in our lives. They tell us to stand still, be quiet, pay attention. We don’t often do these things, but when we enter an art gallery filled with paintings, there is always one somewhere that stops us in our tracks and forces us to say the word “Look!”
Copyright 2008. www.RichardPrattOnView.com. All rights reserved.
The paintings in this show were all painted within the last four years. It has been said that paintings resemble each other far more closely than an individual painting resembles anything in the real world. This is certainly true of my work.
Inspiration for me is a simple process of noticing some part of the world around me that will translate into my language of painting. That means that close observation or study don’t really enter into the process. Something simply strikes me as formally interesting and is lifted out of the world and into the painting.
Often preconceptions are more personal and intentional. I began four years ago with the idea of creating a series of paintings that were not strictly cloned one from the other, but linked to each other like generations in a family through the use of a non-symbolic, repeated element, a disk-like, abstract circle. The disk served as a protagonist or presence in each painting without placing any narrative demands on the viewer. The motif also allowed me to explore abstractly representational images as well as completely non-representational ones.
More recently, trees have become the protagonists in my paintings. They have a quality of gesture and stance that is similar to the human figure without the drama or attitude that a figure might suggest. There is a theme running through many recent paintings that subtly contrasts the natural world with the manmade environment.
What do you feel they are trying to say?
With a lot of my paintings, the viewer may experience a sense of calm that approaches blankness. The artist isn’t giving too much away, and that allows the viewer to interpret the painting in his or her own manner. Hearing what other people have to say is part of my enjoyment of my work.
I was recently pondering why the words “expression” and “expressiveness” annoyed me whenever artists or critics used them. I decided that I preferred to see ideas and emotions not as the content of my works, but as part of the reaction the viewer will have to them. I remember a painting that I did during college in my parents’ garage. It depicted part of a Coke machine, the part where the bottles came out. I remember being amazed by how it looked and I had a strong, almost hormonal, reaction to the image. The painting itself “expressed” very little.
It intrigues me that an artist is as much a viewer of his finished work as anyone else is. My simple formal preconceptions for a painting come to be cluttered with ideas during the process of painting and well beyond the point when the painting is actually finished and hanging on a wall. My ideas about my use of pattern, multiple canvas panels, disks, towers, trees and fence posts were all more clearly defined after the process of using them in my work.
I love to paint, and by that I mean the physical act of painting. I often think that the simple composition that I use as a starting point for a painting is just the scaffolding that supports the act. At the end of the process there is an image that satisfies or intrigues the viewer.
Paintings serve a wonderful function in our lives. They tell us to stand still, be quiet, pay attention. We don’t often do these things, but when we enter an art gallery filled with paintings, there is always one somewhere that stops us in our tracks and forces us to say the word “Look!”
Richard Pratt
2008
2008
Copyright 2008. www.RichardPrattOnView.com. All rights reserved.
