Introducing Richard Downs
Man with Arms Raised, 2021, Monoprint, ink on Japanese paper, 21 × 17 in, 53.3 × 43.2 cm. VIEW ON ARTSY
Couple #397, 2021, Monoprint, ink on Japanese paper, 21 × 17 in, 53.3 × 43.2 cm. VIEW
JLM: Comment on your background and your early experiences with art. Comment on mentors and influences over the years.
RD: grew up in Southern California during the hotrod and mini truck craze of the 70’s. I was still in high school and a friend had introduced me to the airbrush and its abilities to create smooth renderings and I was blown away. I got an airbrush for my high school graduation and now I was all set to start my career in art. I quickly started painting murals on hotrods and mini trucks. I soon met “The Wizard”—a mysterious character who wore long flowing wizard’s robes, and whose actual name no one really knew. The man owned a tiny T-shirt shop on Sunset Boulevard, and he paid me to airbrush clothing. I could paint whatever I felt like painting, and the artistic freedom was fun. This connection led to a significant early commission. Less than one year after high school, I landed a job to paint the tour bus of a band that I had never heard of. The band’s singer was Lionel Richie, and his band was called the Commodores. The Commodores hired me to paint a Frank Frazetta mural. Frazetta was a popular fantasy artist of the times who I really admired. I painted a Conan the Barbarian type figure deflecting a lighting bolt in an airline hangar at LAX. After a couple years of airbrushing I wasn’t’t growing as an artist and I also realized that living in a spray booth and breathing toxic chemicals might not be so good for the long term. And by the 80s, the popularity of airbrush art was waning. It had gained a cheesy reputation and was considered juvenile. This is when I started my education at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
JLM: What are some milestone works from your body of work ( attach images for our audience if possible)
RD: My early airbrush experience taught me about color and media and following through on projects even when I was insecure and had little experience. I have worked for most U.S. periodicals and newspapers ranging from Smithsonian to the New York Times. I have designed children’s books for National Geographic Learning, and I was the lead cover artist for Lynda.com as an editorial illustrator. I also designed and Illustrated the Japanese Folk Tale “Hofus the Stone Cutter” children’s book. I no longer work in the commercial art industry and I devote my entire time to fine art. My most current milestone was designing and fabricating a private commission for a 9’ tall sculpture called, “The Family”. This piece tested all of my abilities as an artist and fabricator.
Richard Downs with The Family
JLM: Comment on your current practice. What direction are you heading with your work?
RD: Right now I am really into works on paper and chasing that perfect line that holds the perfect amount of ink and attitude. I have been introducing more mythology into my current work and this is a theme that I am developing further.
Richard Downs, Joshua Tree, 2021, Monoprint, ink on Japanese paper, 21 × 17 in, 53.3 × 43.2 cm. VIEW ON ARTSY
JLM: Comment on your materials. You seem to be very much at home with sculpture, painting, and printmaking. How do you manage your studio time amongst your different projects
RD: Media experimentation has always been interesting to me. I grew up with a full wood shop and machine shop in our garage of my dads and that experience and experimentation is still strong in the work. I work in themes of media and right now I am focused on printmaking and when I feel that I have exhausted some of my ideas I will switch over to wire and work back and forth.
JLM: Comment on your interest in mythology and how it applies to your work. Comment on the Monotypes on exhibit at the Linda Matney Gallery
Woman #223, 2021, Monoprint, ink on Japanese paper, 21 × 17 in, 53.3 × 43.2 cm. VIEW
Richard Downs, Couple #409, 2021, Monoprint, ink on Japanese paper, 21 × 17 in, 53.3 × 43.2 cm. VIEW ON ARTSY
Richard Downs, Minotaur #394, 2021, Monoprint, ink on Japanese paper, 21 × 17 in, 53.3 × 43.2 cm. VIEW
RD: I love Ancient Greek Mythology. It is fantastic, scary, absurd and ridiculous at times yet ancient cultures believed in these tales and even today people still believe. I take a sort of revisionist view of Mythology in my work, after all isn’t all visual media a Mythology of some sort? The Monotypes are are transfer technique that I reengineered from seeing the works of Paul Klee and Edgar Degas work that had a line quality that looked like nothing I had seen before and I needed to get it into my work. There are elements of chance, randomness and surprise that happens to the work during the printmaking process. These are Monotypes meaning there is only one impression of the work, they are all unique unlike Monotype that creates series of pieces built around a repeating matrix. I work on acid free handmade Japanese paper with archival inks and no two pieces are alike.
JLM: Comment on the three sculptures we are presenting on Artsy
Machina Series , 2021, Braided Carbon Steel Wire, Baltic Plywood and Spray Paint, available individually. VIEW ON ARTSY
RD: These three sculptures were created as a theme called Triade Machina. I was raised with a devout Catholic mom and an atheist father so I can accept all forms of support or rejection of religion. I tried to bring in the element of chance and randomness when creating the faces, especially the father whose face was created as a sort of collage of wooden shapes that I loosely piled over each other and then I replicated the looseness of positioning and fused them all together. The wire relates to the line work of my Monotypes and it also carefree and automatic feel about it even within the anatomy of the figures. These pieces bridge the gap between my Monotypes and my sculpture. These pieces are not overtly religious but in fact, open to interpretation by the viewer.
JLM: Comment on your larger works and public art projects
RD: I have been fortunate to receive several large-format sculpture commissions and have been a finalist on several public art projects. Every artist dreams of going monumental and when I got my first large-scale steel sculpture commission I didn’t have any equipment so I went out and bought a plasma cutter and a MIG welder with my start fee and taught myself how to weld and plasma cut steel. The sculpture was easy to design at 8x11 inches but it had to then be scaled to 9’ tall. The only solution for me was to build a cardboard maquette to the scale of the sculpture and after it was finished take it apart and use the cardboard pieces as templates to cut the steel. It was really fun to see my style reproduced at that scale.
Views of The Family
JLM:. What else would you want our collectors and patrons to know about you and your work?
RD: I transfigure steel, twisted wire, painting and printmaking into a visual mythology celebrating human connectedness. At the first impression my figures may be connecting in some fashion but it is the viewer who makes the connection and completes the story. These stories are metaphors for how we connect to each other, ourselves and our communities.
Richard Downs, Couple #224, 2021, Monoprint, ink on Japanese paper, 21 × 17 in, 53.3 × 43.2 cm. VIEW