Motorcycles and Studio Ghosts: Rodney Dickson in Conversation with

Jeffrey Morabito

Rodney Dickson currently has a show up at David & Schweitzer Contemporary

until March 28th. There is no title for the show, nor are there any titles for the
paintings. Compared to some previous shows at this gallery, the show is sparsely
hung. The less-is-more approach makes sure there are no distractions from his
heavily loaded paintings. The weight of these paintings comes from the physical
amount of paint that has been slathered on, and the psychic power from them.
Even though the paintings are abstract, between the chunks of paint it feels as if
an image is waiting to burst through. Michael David, co-owner of David &
Schweitzer Contemporary, has described to Rodney that his paintings look like
what so many other thick impasto painters try to do, but his achieve something
more. The globs of oil paint are easily over three inches thick. But unlike his
other impasto counterparts, there are some spots so thin or just completely bare,
showing the white of the panel through. No paint is hesitantly applied. Every
touch, or absence of it, is done with conviction.

Rodney:

Someone once said that you can tell what type of painter someone is by looking
at their palette.

Jeffrey:

I actually don’t see a palette

I don’t have one. I mix directly on the painting. If I need one I’ll grab a piece of
wood or cardboard but I normally don’t use a palette.

The most pressing question I had coming out from my last studio visit is
about the famous Philip Guston quote you mentioned about studio ghost.
Its when you first go into your studio there are many other people in their
with you; mentors, friends, family, other voices of influence. But then the
longer you stay inside working, one by one they leave the room. And
eventually, you will leave the room too. For me this is a quote that draws a
line in the sand about what type of artist you are. When I first heard this
quote, it answered a lot of questions for me. For some other people,
however, it brings up more questions. I find the way you paint is very much
in that territory.

I think it is exactly the way painting works for me or other painters like me. That
quote puts it well but you can put it another way, athletes talk about getting in
the zone. You can learn all the elements of making a painting and be very good at
it and still what you end up with is just a painting. And somehow the sum of its
parts have to end up more that just a painting. 2 and 2 has to be more than 4, 2
and 2 has to be 10.

Frank Auerbach spoke about it one time, he described it as the magic of painting.
Something happens . . . its hard to describe in words, its more of a feeling,
spiritual is a word I don’t like to use, but it is something like that.

Right, if it wasn’t for the overuse of the word spiritual I would definitely
define it as something spiritual.

Transcendence is another word that I think applies but I don’t like to use it cause
I’m not a Buddhist you know. I don’t like the sound of it but it works. So Guston’s
quote is a pretty good one. It describes well the territory that I work in.

You ever feel like you delay finishing a painting on purpose?

I don’t know, but probably, maybe subconsciously. I used to work on my

paintings for a year, I’m trying to get more quick at doing them. Ironically it takes
more courage for me to do that. Its kinda like if you’re working on something for
a year it should be good, because you know what you put into it, but if work on
something for an afternoon there must be some doubt there because you didn’t
put much work into it. So I’m trying to find the courage to call it finished sooner.
Now I feel working on them for a year kind of killed them in a way, maybe not
killed them but they became something else, but maybe they didn’t need to
become something else.

I use to think with Frank Auerbach paintings, he would work on them for years,
and he would change them everyday, and in the end it ends up with a few marks
here and there. I don’t know if anyone knows what they’re like in the first day
but I’m curious, I think on the first day, they might be good. I just wonder
between the first day and the last day the difference is very slight. It’s only
something very slight that he feels, that if we say, we couldn’t really see a
difference. I’m curious about that.

Sometimes just on the first day when I paint the surface white and I have a white
painting I think it’s done, it’s already fucking beautiful as it is. What more would
you want than a white painting? Its beautiful, its calm, it’s meditative, its
fantastic, there’s already so much there, so why spoil it. And whenever I start a
painting its miserable, nothing’s happening, but when something is happening,
you don’t want to go to bed that night, so that’s also why I’d keep on working on
them. And the thing that I never care about is ruining a painting. If people say, it’s
finished, you’ll fuck it up tomorrow, I’d say who cares, I think its about learning
more.

In a related question of fucking up your painting, perhaps a more

appropriate term would be destroying. I feel there is an underlying sense
of violence in your work. I don’t know if its something you think about or
it’s just part of who you are as a painter.

I don’t know either. Art critics would say it comes from where I’m from,
Northern Ireland. I grew up in a violent society. I’m not much of a violent person,
but I understand violence. I also think there’s a deep sensitivity to them, and
there’s subtle things going on, and garish things going on, and all the different
elements we do in our life. But there is violence in them, but I don’t see it
anymore, I used too. In the same way how I don’t smell oil paint in my studio
anymore.

Maybe, I have thought about this before, what is perceived as violence, that
maybe I’m injecting an element of drama to it.

Well, there’s different levels of violence. A long time ago when I was sharing a
studio with a few artists, I did this landscape painting, everyone seemed to like it.
I didn’t really like it but everyone was saying that’s the best thing you’ve done. So
it sat there for 2-3 days and then I painted it over with something completely
different. Then this artist stopped coming into the studio, or she’d go whenever I
wasn’t there. It wasn’t that she didn’t like me. I asked her why I never see her in
the studio anymore. I don’t go when you’re there because you’re too violent. I
said what did you mean. She said don’t get me wrong, I love you and your work
but there is a violence about you and the way you work that I can’t deal with. I
said I’m sorry, what did I do? She said that was a beautiful painting but the next
time I saw you had painted it over. In a way it kind of annoyed me because it’s
my fucking painting, but it’s an extreme sensitivity to something that could be
called violence that decided to paint over my painting and that was considered a
violent act.

Well sometimes I destroy a painting just because I can.

Right, knowing my perverse personality I bet I destroyed it just because

everyone said they liked it.

Last time I was here, you said some people see a pastoral scene in your
work. I think rather than copying nature directly, you are painting with
nature.

Yes that’s a good way to put it. I think if the paintings work, the thing they’re
getting relates to elements of the world and it includes all those things, including
violence. But violence may not be the correct interpretation of it. Certainly I
would say there is a ruthlessness in the work, as we discussed, not to be precious
and to be prepared to destroy and create without fear. I would say one must
have 'fire in the belly' to create art, somewhere inside us, there must be some
need to create, one must have a reason to make art.

Many artists have had some trauma or difficulty in their lives and this gives them
an 'edge'.

As we discussed, knowing how to draw well and use paint well will achieve some
level of success, but most artists can do that, there has to be something else to
bring out the 'magic'

I hate when people say they like my painting before its done.

I know cause then you’re stuck with it, cause either you agree with them which is
something you don’t want to do, or you go out against them which is something
you don’t want to do cause you know they may be right.

Its weird, I’m asking you questions that I already know the answer to.

But that’s the best way since you understand the thing better. I’ve had curators
come through here and act like it’s their own place. They don’t get what I’m
doing at all and ask totally irrelevant questions. And it got me thinking awhile
ago what I would say to curators in the future. I would say in a polite way, I’m
going to make some coffee, have a look at my paintings. I’ll be 5 or 10 mins. Then
when I’m done, if the paintings did anything for you I’d be happy to talk to you
about them. If the paintings didn’t do anything for you, than we can talk about
something else. I said it once to John Davis and he said I didn’t come to see you I
came to see your paintings, go make your coffee. It worked that day.

Where art has gone now, it’s not a place that I don’t understand, but a place
I can’t enter sincerely. It makes me cynical. When it comes down to it
there’s always two questions; what to paint and how to paint it. And if
you’re talking about things that stray too far away . . .they are very general
questions, what are you painting, which you can never answer in one word.
And how you are doing it.
If I was to be very formal and technical about your work, I’d say what
you’re doing is about how you are taking away the paint, not how you’re
putting it on. I think its interesting how you said someone told you, you can
tell what type of person a painter is by looking at their palette. And you
don’t have a palette.

It sounded like when you had the figure in your work, trying to describe
something too specifically, but you wanted to be more open with what you
were describing. But the way you’re working now I think you are getting at
something more specific in terms of the paint and the materiality itself. If
you wanted to put it in context with painting, I think what you’re doing is a
very specific position on what painting is. Because what you’re doing is
something that a lot of people are trying to do.

I think at some point I realized this is something that I always really wanted to
do. But some reason I haven’t done it. I remember one day I had that thought.

I also think this has something to with living in a place like NY. Prior to living
here, I think it had to do with finding justification for your position as an artist.
Where in Northern Ireland, its certainly not an art place like NY. And when I
lived in Liverpool, the street that I lived on, I didn’t want people to particularly
know that I was an artist. It was a working class neighborhood and they would
probably think, argh, that’s a strange guy. But in NY, everyone knows I’m an
artist, even on the first day I moved in. It’s not an important thing, but it did
occur to me when I was making the change in my work. But the thing I think that
is the essence of the work but what I find most difficult to talk about is these
words that I don’t like to use like spiritual or transcendent, I think that’s what it
is about. And if talking about things like; more paint or less paint, or do I scrape it
off. Those things only concern us because we’re painters, but in the end of the
day it doesn’t matter how I did it, I could be using a spray gun and making it
super thin. It wouldn’t matter if it had that effect at the end of the day. I think I
read something about Pollack, or something he said, don’t get hung up on the
drips. Drip painting or no drips, who cares, it’s the end of the painting that
matters!

The technical details can be arbitrary.

Yeah, as craftsman, we need to know how to do these things, but people who
look at them don’t need to know how we did it. We’re not house builders, we
don’t care how a house is built, we just want to live in it.

So motorcycles. I know you’re a seriously into them. What is the Pollock of

motorcycles for you.

Well this orange bike here is a Kawasaki H-1, its from 1972. I’ve had them since
they came out in 1972, this is the 4th or 5th one I owned. They were built as the
fastest motorcycles ever at that time. They were also the most dangerous
motorcycles at that time too. Instead of Kawasaki, people named them Kamikazi.

That sounds like the Pollock of motorcycles for you.

There’s a good story that goes with this, I’m not so sure if it’s true, but these
motorcycles were first built in 69’. When they were first sold in America many
people got killed in them. So the American motorcycle federation went to
Kawasaki, and they said you have to do something with these motorcycles, a lot
of people are getting killed in them. When the Japanese government during
World War II told Kawasaki that they were going to surrender, Kawasaki replied
“No, we will never surrender as long as we have one pilot to fly a plane.” So when
the Americans complained to Kawasaki about people getting killed on their
motorcycles, they said, “No, we will not make them slower, if Americans can’t
ride them, they will die”.

Rodney Dickson is the recipient of a Pollock Krasner Award and a Ford Foundation
Artist Grant, and has exhibited his work in solo exhibitions at John Davis Gallery in
Hudson (where he has an upcoming exhibition in the summer of 2018), New York,
NUNU Fine Art in Taipei, Taiwan, and Gasser Grunert in New York City. Dickson’s
work is held in numerous public collections, including the Hanoi Art Center in
Hanoi, Vietnam; Arts Council of Northern Ireland in Belfast, Ireland; Arts Council Of
Great Britain in Manchester, England; Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland;
and the Palmer Museum of Art in Pennsylvania.