Earlier this month, one of my favorite artists featured recently at MCASD, Richard Wright, was awarded the Turner Prize, Great Britain’s best-known art award.
Known for painting “intricate, large-scale patterns” directly on walls and ceilings, Wright is a meticulous craftsman who uses very traditional methods to create very modern abstract images.
To make his untitled wall painting for the Turner prize exhibition, Wright employed the painstaking techniques of Renaissance fresco-makers – drawing a cartoon on paper and then transferring it to the wall in what he called “an incredibly medieval way” by pouncing – piercing the cartoon with holes and rubbing chalk through it to create “the ghost of a work” on the wall. The image was then painted with size (adhesive) and covered with gold leaf.
Because I use many of the same methods in my not-anywhere-as-innovative mural work, this appeals to me ina kindred spirits kind of way, as well as his insistence on working at such large scale.
Turner Prize winner Richard Wright
Another aspect of Wright’s work that resonates with me is his “insistence that his work be destroyed after the exhibitions end.”
Working as I have in theater and film and performing in public chalk painting festivals, many of the things I have painted and laboured over have been immediately destroyed after their designed user experience ends. Similarly, many of my private commissioned murals and custom finishes will never be seen by the greater public, nor would they make much sense outside the context of the home the were designed for.
When questioned about this, particularly at chalk festivals, people ask me if I am bothered by the “loss” of the work, to which I usually reply that it makes sense to me as most of my work is “lost” to me upon completion.
Wright said he sometimes felt a sense of loss at the destruction of his work.
“It is sad but it’s also a relief,” he said. “Other people make things that don’t survive. If you are a dustman or a reporter you do something that is consumed and passes.”
I find this point of view as refreshing as Wright’s work (featured in San Diego most recently in 2007), putting in perspective the “precious-ness” that many artists feel about their work.
“I am interested in the fragility of the moment of engagement – in heightening that moment,” he said. To see a work knowing that it will not last, he said, “emphasizes that moment of its existence”.
Since this is very close to how I answer the question “Why are you an artist?”, I feel even more affinity for Wright and his work upon reading about his award. Congratulations from San Diego, Richard Wright!
As usual I am indebted to ArtDaily.org for some of the details in this article. You can read their original post about Wright here, written by AP reporter Jill Lawless.
My other source for quotes and the image above is the always outstanding Guardian UK.Thir article on Wright was written by Charlotte Higgins, and features some great video as well as an excellent photo slideshow on Wright you can see here.
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