RICHARD TINKLER

NB: Can you describe some of the first works that you made? How are they different and how have they evolved into what your practice is now?
RT: I remember reading that question and being really surprised. I mean, they’ve changed a lot and I feel like they’re changing all the time. Different people have different experiences of my work, some people experience it as very consistent and some people experience it as changing all the time. To me, the fact that I see it as always changing is a very important quality, because it means to always be exploring and pushing things and not taking anything for granted.

NB: Where do you start? How does your process vary between painting and drawing?
RT: They’re separate and they’re related, but they’re not connected. I don’t think of making a drawing for a painting. An idea is just as likely to go from a painting to a drawing as from a drawing to a painting. Overall the big difference is that paintings are wet and drawings are dry. So the more graphic ideas tend to get explored in the drawings, and then the more kind of atmospheric ideas are explored in painting.

NB: Do you work with a set of rows, a grid, or some sort of set vocabulary?
RT: Well, I think a lot of times the paintings or drawings, or whatever I’m working on, comes out of something I’ve done before. So what really sets up that ‘vocabulary’ is basically what I’ve done before because it kind of creates an environment and, in order for the work to make sense, it has to have some sort of context. The world is kind of the context for it, and all the art that came before, and other art people are making, but then you also kind of create a context for it within your own work, which sets up a parameter and defines where I start each new piece.
I also pretty much draw every day, sometimes I draw all day long, but usually I get up early in the morning and draw for a couple hours and it’s almost something I do without thinking. With drawings I work on in groups, each drawing is an individual drawing, but then they’re always in pairs because I think of them as spreads of two pages, like a book. That’s why there’s two that kind of go together and then they become part of a larger sequence, which in my mind is what it’s organized is like. Each drawing kind of unfolds from the center, and then the sequence unfolds as you move chronologically through the book. There’s like an echo between what’s happening in each drawing and then what happens in the larger groups of drawings.

NB: What about the painting process?
RT: So a lot of these paintings they’re made in one sitting. It’s all wet into wet in one day. I start by covering the whole surface in white paint. Then I take my palette, which is a piece of wax paper where I mix up all the paints, and I lay the canvas down on the ground, scraping the palette across the surface to make a kind of streak. Then I put the painting back up on the wall and I take a little brush and I use it to move the paint around the surface. So everything is happening on the surface, the paint mixes and moves around. The kind of blur that happens, the detail, the texture, it all kind of happens as a result of what’s on the surface as I move things around with little brush strokes.

NB: How does intuition come into play in your process?
RT: On the one hand, when you’re working, you don’t want to be thinking too much about it and just kind of like feel. A lot of times it’s not so much about what looks right, but what feels right, and your body can help break you out of how your eye is used to seeing things. So a lot of times when I’m working, I go on kind of thinking if this feels like what I want to do.
Then you have to stop to look and think of it as if you’re someone else. It’s a matter of going back and forth. You don’t want to make decisions in the moment from an intellectual standpoint necessarily, but you want to be able to back up and look at it that way from time to time. So there’s an important part in intuition, because it’s balanced out by thinking about it and being intuitive, and the two kind of like work together.

NB: What are some references in your work? Do you look at other artists or disciplines that inform you?
RT: A lot of the influences are kind of old. I don’t know why that is, but one thing is New York painting from the 70s. Mary Heilmann, David Reed, Jack Whitten, Al Loving and Lynda Benglis. There’s a bunch of people who were doing painting in New York and a lot of them were women or people of color or queer people, and although it wasn’t like the main thing that was going on, in retrospect it was such an important and interesting time.
A lot of them were also abstract painters and mostly process oriented, so they’re standing from this viewpoint where you’re kind of trying to find your own voice more than trying to tell everyone that this is ‘the way’ or the next big thing in art. And this is how things should be. It was a different viewpoint, more open and kind of idiosyncratic way of looking at painting, which I really respond to.
And as I was saying before too, I feel like these paintings have started to connect with a lot of 1950’s painting like Newman and Pollock. And still, for me, there’s two other painters that have helped me connect back to the 50s: one is Ross Blechner and the other is Brice Marden. I think that those two help me form a bridge back to that time.
NB: Excellent. So do you have any recent or upcoming projects, exhibitions that you’d like to share with us?
Well, I’m doing a two person show in Spain in the beginning of April at Villa Magdalena which is a sort of old church looking space, and I’m also doing expo Chicago with 56 Henry at the end of April.