Statement

The body possesses its own inherent rhythm – that of the heart. It is the tic-toc that then meshes with all of those rhythms outside the body – the click-clacks of the street, the passage of the sun, the planets, the seasons, the course of a life itself – bringing a connectedness between the two; body and world, even if syncopated or poly-rhythmic. Then, bodies and systems and rhythms encounter other bodies and systems and rhythms.

For thousands of years painting has embodied: hands gently hold a baby; the pushing away of an aggressor; the clasping of a sword; the embraces of lovers. Even bodies alone, emerging from the darkness or ascending to heaven; emanations. At the same time, painting has stood as a stand-in for corporeality, becoming the flesh.

Intimacy is more interesting, albeit often more frightening, than distance. Distance provides perspective, but in intimacy, those straight lines curve inward, following another logic. Sometimes things blur, become indistinct and ambiguous, and then, sometimes the narrative you assumed as real changes. There is metamorphosis; you can’t hold onto the demon too tightly for it changes.

There is also a great difference between forging something specifically with the hands – rendering an image – forcing it to take shape out of the materials at hand; as opposed to allowing it, breathing it on to the surface, taking shape mysteriously from the materials and the process; a discovery as opposed to the making real of a thought. This traditional dialectic has shown itself as the school of form versus color; perhaps an artificially contrived notion that didn’t really form an antipathy between Michelangelo and Raphael, or Ingres and Delacroix, but nonetheless might be echoed in the traditions of art down to this day. either way, I find myself most attracted to the idea of art emerging from the process, resulting in something that was unimagined.

In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a mediation practice of tenglon, in which you breathe in all that is hateful in the world, and breathe out love. What if I could make a painting that reached out and embraced the viewer, like a long lost lover, or returning son? What if I could make a room full of such paintings.

What if you could feel the color on your skin, much in the same way you might feel sound on your fingers, or even your face?

What if a painting not only spoke within itself, but inwardly and outwardly from the surface, creating rhythms of movement, and undulating light?

In countless world traditions, those shaman living just outside the borders of the community are responsible for connecting the quotidian with the underlying spirit and would of the world. They expose others to more feeling. The painter is a type of shaman.

-Ric Dragon, 2018

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