We were lucky to catch up with Stephen Reynolds recently and have shared our conversation below.

Stephen, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

Life as an artist is trying, and endless. Success and failure are both short-lived. The shift from triumph to despair is way faster than you’d hope, or expect. The upside is the degree of emotion you get while engaged in the work itself – that I don’t find elsewhere. In my life I have usually had to have some other kinds of work as a backup to my artistic practice – I have a wife and two daughters and we can’t keep running aground financially like I did before them. What some people underestimate is the skillset an artist needs to assemble to have any success does translate to jobs outside the artworld. It is not the same as working in your chosen field, but you have to live, and all experiences can be artful in their own way, even the most monotonous or physically taxing. I’ve done so many jobs I couldn’t count them – from set-builder to bus driver to manual laborer – they all contribute to my world view and creative life. I don’t feel I’ve ever had a choice whether to be an artist or not – I just refuse to stop making work, and the ramifications of that I’ll deal with as they come.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I got a job at Christie’s auction house when I was studying at Melbourne University, and worked in the painting department; hanging works, holding them up at auction, packing them afterward. I held in my hands literally thousands of the best paintings in the world (certainly in Australia) It was a visceral way to be introduced to painting – I was a solid art student at high school but was studying history and politics at university. This job was transformational. I felt very close to some of the artists, literally studying their brushwork microscopically, reading inscriptions on the back, hanging 600 paintings in a way that made sense aesthetically. It was an incredible education, but I only started painting after I finished working there. Once I started I painted furiously for years. Fast forward 25 years and I have exhibited in cities around the world, I have supported myself for periods solely on my art, and I have gone hungry and slept on park benches at other times. I feel very lucky. I married a painter, and she understands the life we have chosen. A few years ago I had an installation make global news (#vaginatunnel for Cara Delevigne) and seeing it in editorials for major newspapers like the Guardian, and as the subject of a segment on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was a real hoot. Then it burned to the ground just a few weeks ago in a house fire. I guess that’s a decent example of the ‘triumph and despair’ pendulum. I have a new painting series which is a real breakthrough for me, and that is all I am focused on now.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

DESECRATION : An Art Story. I live in Hollywood, but not the fancy part. We live with a constant hum of crime and simmering violence. Occasionally I have been drawn into it – intervening in an DV assault embroiled me into it (the thug came after me but settled for our car.) I hand-built an RV and it has been stolen twice – recovered but stripped. I paint emotive landscapes and cloudscapes , and sometimes I just float away with them, only to be dragged back to the primal exigencies of life – hunger, venality and urban malaise. Our apartment is periodically tagged by street gangs (MS_13 primarily) and then overwritten by rival local gangs. So, I mimicked the gang tags over my landscape paintings. What began as an act of desecration has evolved into something more. My creative fury has revealed itself to be more rooted in history and place – that these tags have a story and a cultural legacy not unlike what I bring to the canvas. There’s a gestural immediacy I could learn from. Navigating these two irreconcilable worlds is something I have been unwittingly engaged in for years, and my work needs to reflect it somehow. The initial brutal scar of the spray paint over the delicate oil paint – once unsettling is now making more sense. There is a violence in the act and in the intended significance – and there is beauty and history and meaning too. As an artist, it’s part of my job to discern both.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

THE ART MARKET IS NOT THE ENEMY When I first arrived in America I was chosen to be in an art fair. I was a bit wild and loose back then. I was traveling and (just) surviving on paintings being paid off gradually by people who could barely afford them. I was deeply moved by their commitment. I met a similarly wild and loose artist, and we discussed this commitment and – somewhat sarcastically – noted that to steal a painting was the greatest gesture of commitment an artist could ever be granted. Years earlier I had seen the Christies auction house light up when a previously stolen painting came through, and I always looked at those works differently. There seemed to be no harm done. So, he stole my painting. On opening night of a packed Art Fair in Los Angeles. Initially caught, he slipped security, and got away. We were lucky nothing terrible happened. I told no-one, but eventually the dealer found out and I was unceremoniously dropped. I decided to work outside the formal art world from then on. I look back now, 20 yers later, and wonder if that might have been a misstep.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.reyxreynolds.com
• Instagram: @reyx_rey
• Other: www.audiblegaspagency.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Reynolds_(artist)#Artistic_work