Themes, images, motivations.... : Jesse Richards

Most of what I’ve done over the last ten years or so including my short films, paintings, drawings, photography, etc., have been influenced by a few things. German expressionism, les fauves, punk cinema/photography, as well as the Buddhist concept of impermanence and some Japanese aesthetics like mono no aware and wabi-sabi have all made an impact on me and have affected what I make. It’s very hard to say what “themes” I deal with beyond that, because I try to leave most of what I’m doing up to intuition, so I may not even know what I’m about to do until I’m actually doing it. Using my intuition is very important to me, because I feel it is the only way to keep what I’m doing honest, and hopefully free from too much contrivance. The only reason why I can talk about mono no aware and the other art and concepts that affect my work is because I know that those are my interests, and I can see the influence after I’ve done something. But I’m not trying to push those things into what I do, as I’m doing it; I just know it's there from seeing it later. That being said, I can talk about some things that I like which will probably end up in whatever images I produce in this class.

Last year I started making what I think might be a personal breakthrough on drawing. I’ve always hated drawing and would go out of my way to avoid doing it. This probably had a lot to do with my problems with being able to see depth properly. I’ve always had poor depth perception. This made it all but impossible to draw in a realistic manner. So I began to try to do other things in my drawings. One thing that I started to do was to make heavy use of my eraser when doing charcoal drawings. I would make these intense, wild streaks in the background. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was about when I started doing it; just that it seemed like the right thing for me to be doing. I think that this was an attempt to make the world that I was drawing seem like it was in a state of constant flux. That is at least the impression that I had after looking at the finished drawings. I’m pretty reluctant to think about this too in depth for fear of this method becoming insincere and contrived, and therefore a trap for me to fall into rather than being an authentic mode of expression, which is what it seems to be at the moment. Beyond that, I’ve tended to produce work that is fairly simple, but intensely rendered as far as color, shape, line and texture. When making short films or shooting photographs I’ve been attracted to and used grainier films, and used technologically primitive cameras, like Holgas or pinhole cameras (sometimes broken cameras and expired film) and when painting I usually use a fast impasto painting style, mixing colors directly on the canvas. I suspect that while making woodcuts I’ll be interested in exploring the natural flaws in the wood and having them actually show up in the image. I probably will even handle the wood harshly, using sandpaper maybe and trying different ways to bring a kind of simple roughness into the image. I like the things I do to look like they are made by a human being, so I try to avoid perfect lines and things of that nature. I like to see the brushstrokes in paintings. I love Die Brücke. I hate photorealism.

Actual subject matter can vary for me as far as it usual involves what interests me at any given moment. Probably the best thing for me to do is to talk about what images have interested me in the past. I like expressionistic self-portraits, images of trees, flowers, boats, barns, country and maritime subjects, cats, night, rain, fog, old objects- like old shoes, hats, and also, the female form. These images are sometimes parts of memories, sometimes part of an imagined past. I make images of the things that make me feel alive, and sometimes what makes me feel nostalgic. This kind of explanation of theme is something that I’m not used to writing, so hopefully this has accomplished what you were expecting without me being too vague.