We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Rick Steinburg . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Rick below.
Rick, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
My Life Series of art works is an ongoing project. It began in 2018, asking the impossible question: Why do humans brutalize each other? We have a long history with cruelty throughout time. I wanted to explore what this looks like in this series. I also wanted to contrast this by portraying the joys that humans experience through life; the unguarded moments where love and innocence rise to the top. Since I began this series, life in our human society continues to evolve and the question of our brutality to one another has added several chapters and appears in our daily news in greater and more unimaginable forms. I have worked through many of these new elements and even some reappearing forms. Much work to be done! Some of this is extremely difficult to tackle, but I continue to feel compelled to make an attempt to deal with it through my artwork. At the same time there has been a lot of contentment in experiencing life as a retired fine arts educator and a father of three adult daughters. With the girls and the addition of a husband, Fiancé, boyfriend, and pets there is much to enjoy and feel thankful for. All of these experiences in life are part of the subject matter of this series.
Sometimes I feel that the subject of life is so broad that nearly anything that happens in our human experience could be part of this series, and that maybe a bit of focus would have created several more specific series. But it’s easier to see this after several years of adding over 100 artworks to the collection. It was the flow of the work that dictated the subsets within the whole. Specifically there were pieces that were about ancient or historical stories and significant events in our human experience. There were pieces centered around current events; I actually did branch out with a smaller Life During Pandemic series. There were some pieces devoted to my mother’s fight with Dementia which resulted in her passing. There were pieces dealing with the resurgence of racism and the loss of accepted facts and truth. I believe we are experiencing what will be the most historical significant events of my lifetime, so there is a lot to work with.
There were several artistic developments that occurred during this time; the development of my use of block prints, the use of repurposed materials salvaged from the flooding of our house, and the development of monsters as metaphors for our worst human behaviors.
My use of block printing in my artworks came out of a desire to find ways of applying paint without the use of paint brushes. I have used putty knives, pallet knives, scraps of wood and my fingers with a lot of success. I added stamping the paint with various objects which worked well and that evolved into making wood block prints. I then moved to make block prints with the block or plate made from repurposed foil and styrofoam insulation. This allowed me to print bigger areas and the sponginess of the insulation allowed me to print on a variety of surfaces with more success than the wood blocks. I began printing both on paper as a collage element or directly onto the painting. Using an old elementary art teacher trick, I began pouring colored sand on to the wet printed surface where it would stick and collecting the excess sand to be reused. This was all about creating a variety of surfaces and textures within my artworks. I like to joke about being the world’s crudest printmaker, but the results have been very successful.
During the heart of the pandemic, a small plumbing fitting in our kitchen failed and flooded our house while we were gone for a couple of hours. As a result the cabinets in the kitchen and other rooms had to be torn out and replaced. I was struck by the amount of materials that would be discarded during the demolition stage of our house being restored, so I began salvaging materials that I could use to create artworks. I was able to make 40+ artworks from these salvaged materials. Besides being useful materials, there was something healing about making art from the ruins; the ultimate making lemonade from lemons experience!
Many of the prints I was making were of faces. The way I was using the prints directly onto the artwork or as collage elements, and the inherent imperfections of my primitive techniques lent themselves to the faces having a monster vibe. This worked really well with my subject matter and the “monsters” became a metaphor for the brutality and the terror that humans leave in their wake. I created a block print of a Headless Minotaur and a separate head to be used with it. I also created a block print of The Wooden Head; inspired by a wooden sculpture my father had done in college and I had become the caretaker of when he passed. In different ways, these became characters that represented the mindlessness of our violence. The Headless Minotaur represented the lack of reasoning or caring that accompanies our violence to one another. The Wooden Head represented the lack of humanity and empathy in something that so closely resembled a human being but could not respond as a human. About the only conclusion I was able to come up with from my question of why we brutalize one another was that it came out of our fear of others. These characters were very useful in getting that idea across in pieces where the overall composition was somewhat abstract. Since there are quite a few of these pieces, I have thought about creating a separate Monsters series for them.
This big rambling series of artworks may be somewhat loosely organized, but I don’t think that diminishes its importance to my artistic journey. Creating this Life series has given me a way to process where we are in this thing called “Life”. It’s helped me work through the current state of humanity; It’s given me perspective on where and how some of our problems originated, and hopefully it will fortify me for what is to come.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I was introduced to art at an early age. My father was a painter and university art educator. His garage studio had a variety of materials and objects that gave me opportunities to be creative through play. Objects and hardware my father had collected came into use to repair various things that had broken as well as for creative uses. I learned how to improvise, invent, recycle, and repurpose materials to problem solve and create. After I graduated from Illinois State University, I moved to Austin, Texas and became an elementary art educator, a father, a songwriter, and a musician. The second half of my 32 years of teaching in Austin was spent teaching elementary music. The elementary students were always an inspiration because of their honesty, curiosity, and love. I always felt like I learned a lot from the way that 1st graders drew and painted. They could be so expressive and free with their art. In 1988, I had a piece accepted in the national Juried show, New American Talent 1988. My father passed away just before I retired from teaching. So upon retiring, I found myself wanting to do some artworks to honor my dad and his work. He had a history of including numbers, letters, and words in his work, so I fixed on the number 32; the number of years I had taught at Spicewood Elementary in Austin.
So I began my Series 32; Artworks exploring all the possibilities of the number 32. I was incorporating some compositional aspects of my father’s work into how I approached these new pieces and blending it with my other influences; folk art, expressionist art. I had gathered many materials during my years as an educator, and with the skills I had learned from my father, I began to use found objects and hardware to construct unique structures to paint on.
Near the end of my work on the Series 32 Artworks, I began working on pieces that would be the beginning of my next series: Illustrations From the Book of Horse. In this series, I’m making illustrations for an imaginary reference book on all things horse. So initially I had the creation of the horse character, Lucky 32 (The fastest racehorse of 1932), which happened in a totally spontaneous way.
Many of the pieces illustrate the adventures and mishaps of Lucky 32 and other characters that have developed along the way. I also did pieces that illustrate the birth of the first horse, pieces that refer to Texas horse culture, pieces that illustrate a second-rate Wild West show, and pieces that illustrate the coming of the automobile. While these scenes are fictional, they are closely related to our reality; pulled from history and my family’s Texas experience, sourced from my elders.
Many of these stories involve humor, while others connect the past with the ever-changing world we live in. In 2016, I began to be represented by Art on 5th Gallery (now renamed Ao5 Gallery) in Austin. I had eleven pieces exhibited in their Wild Wild West show that year and became one of their stable of artists.
As I worked on these artworks, I developed these concepts about my creative process:
-Seeing the possibilities in objects, words, ideas, sounds.
-Letting the creative process determine part or all of the outcome.
-Finding beauty and joy in unexpected places/forms.
-Being unafraid of mistakes.
-Giving objects and fragments that could easily be discarded a new life and purpose.
-Allowing a narrative to develop organically from the pieces.
My main influences in creating my artworks were expressionist art and folk art. In some of the pieces you can see a pop art influence, at least the part that interested me when I was a kid; of using common objects, but I think here the common objects are depicted or used differently, because they have a certain dignity about them that they maybe didn’t have in the pop art thing. In the late 1950s and 60s pop art was an indictment of how commercial our society was becoming. Today, of course, we’re immersed in all things commercial
In my next series, the American Music series, I am attempting to honor my musical influences. Because I write and play roots blues, a mixture of Texas and Mississippi styles, most of the musicians represented in these artworks come from those genres, with a few jazz performers as well. There is a definite folk art vibe to these pieces. It has been an exciting series for me, as I have found beauty in the faces of the musicians and a deeper connection to their music and the stories of their lives which has enriched both my music and art. This series is also ongoing.
A lot of my recent work is with my Life Series, which was born from asking the impossible question: Why do humans brutalize each other? We have a long history with cruelty throughout time. I wanted to explore what this looks like in this series. I also wanted to contrast this by portraying the joys that humans may experience through life.
A sub series became the Life in Pandemic Series. This group of artworks explored the affect of the pandemic on the human experience.
I also started a Characters Series. these are portraits of various people in our history, but also include mythical and imagined characters. My process was to create a face, and work it until I discovered who the character was. Once the subject’s identity was established, the rest of the piece developed around some part of the person’s life story.
I have been fortunate to have quite a few opportunities to exhibit my work.
2017 – Discovery Show; juried show at Milan Gallery, Fort Worth, Texas
2018 – People’s Gallery 2018 at Austin City Hall; two pieces accepted into this juried show
2018 – Bass Concert Hall,University of Texas at Austin;16 pieces on exhibit
2018 – Ao5 Gallery;Solo show; opening: April 21
2018 – Two pieces accepted in national juried show, Recycle 2018 BWAC; Brooklyn, NY; spring 2018
2019 – Bass Concert Hall; 26 pieces on exhibit; spring 2019
2019 – 14th Annual TAC Juried Exhibit in Fort Worth, TX; August
2019 – Austin Bergstrom Airport Gallery – September 2019 – January 2020
2019 – Ao5 Gallery;Solo show: opening: November 1
2020 – Bass Concert Hall ; 26 pieces on exhibit; January – March 2020
2020 – Hyde Park Bar & Grill – January 26 – March 15
2021 – Hyde Park Bar and Grill, Austin, TX – August – October 3
2021 – Old Bakery Gallery, Austin, Tx – September 1- November 2
2021 – Ao5 Gallery, Austin, TX – October 16
2021 – Hyde Park Bar and Grill, Austin, TX – October 17 – December 19
2021 – FWCA, Fort Worth, TX – November 5 – December 11
I’m also a singer/ songwriter with over 25 years experience performing in Austin and other parts of the United States. I play the resonator guitar (bottleneck style) and both acoustic and electric guitar. I also combine the harmonica with playing the guitar and singing. Most of the music I perform is in the roots blues genre.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I think that I continue to struggle with an urge to protect visual elements that are produced early in my process of creating new pieces. This can include preconceived ideas about what the piece is going to be about. It could be part of a sketch or the under painting for a new piece which may or may not be part of a preconceived composition. Typically, early in an artwork’s development I will find elements that I’m excited about and I have to fight with the urge to protect that part of the composition as I continue to develop the piece. The problem with protecting a part of a developing artwork is that you tend to proceed in a manner that is incongruent with the manner in which the initial element was created. If I create a loose spontaneous figure that I’m happy with and then carefully work around it in the following steps, I typically feel that I’m losing the whole of the piece and then nothing is working together. I’m constantly thinking “How do I finish the piece in the same spirit and with the same energy that I began with?” If the beginning of the piece was created with a lot of physicality, it may be difficult to match this early physicality with what it takes to bring the entire piece to a point of being finished and complete. Sometimes the use of a collage element, found objects, or repurposed materials will help keep the feeling of spontaneity in place. Sometimes replacing the use of a paintbrush or other traditional artists tools with an alternative method will do the same thing. So I may switch to a putty knife or scrap of wood to apply the paint, or I may employ something to stamp or print the media. This is how I developed the use of block printing in combination with painting. I think you have to evaluate how the initial element is functioning as the piece develops. Sometimes the answer is to just to let go of the precious element. As a piece develops, you may realize that original part has become disposable or it is taking away from the whole of the piece, so you replace it with something that serves the artwork better. There are pieces that emanate from the initial work beautifully. Other times I am better served by rejecting the preciousness of part of what I create in the beginning stages of a new piece. The trick seems to be recognizing that I’m being protective of some part of a new piece and evaluating the value of that decision and proceeding accordingly.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
For me, starting with a blank canvas or panel is an exciting moment. I may or may not begin with a preconceived idea of what the artwork could be; either way, I’m excited by all the possibilities of what it can be. I have come to realize that even if I have a definite idea for the new piece, there is much that has yet to be revealed to me as to what the piece will become. Out of nothing you create, and something new will come and take on a life of its own. That is exciting to me, and I believe that provides a lot of motivation to find the image, the story, and the spirit that can emerge from creating. I’ve been fortunate to experience this through my art, music, and writing. I always feel that it is possible that the new work I’m starting could be the best thing I have done. In the end it may not end up being the best thing I’ve done, but I love the possibility that it could be. The news of the day may be horrifying, and that may find its way into the work; but the process of creating results in contentment for me. During the isolation of the pandemic, I found solace in working on my art. There were so many things we could not do during this time, but I could work in my studio, and I was very productive during this time. I felt like that kept me grounded during a difficult time; stories were being told, characters and places were being created. The world of my imagination was alive, surprising me daily and occupying my thoughts even though the outside world seemed to be in disarray. Besides painting, I also learned new songs, and worked on my slide guitar playing. All of the creative activities gave me things other than the news of the day to think about and I welcomed that with open arms.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://artworksricksteinburg.com
- Instagram: ricksteinburgartworks
- Facebook: Rick Steinburg:Artworks
Image Credits
Rick Steinburg Deby Steinburg