What are you currently working on?
Well, I am working on a series of figurative pieces. These are etchings and ink drawings, one of which I was working on when you called, an ink drawing on a white box that I did a figurative piece with, drawing from a model with the image underneath a piece of watercolor paper. It’s kind of an erotic piece. I’ve been working of a series of realist nudes lately, some of which are of a more sensuous nature. The latest series that I’ve begun is a series of tattooed women (and I’d like to mention that I’m looking for models). These are pieces that I’ve drawn from live models, so it’s a little different from what people are used to coming from me. My work has tended to be what I call my comic book kind of style, but basically I’ve retired that to forge ahead with realism. So I’ve been drawing from figures, drawing interiors, machines, landscapes, all kinds of things.
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In addition to his paintings, Russell Richards says that he has a few screenplays in various stages of development. “One is about a society of people who mine the rings of Saturn for precious ore,” he says. “I’d like it to be animated, too, with contemporary rotoscoping techniques.” |
Tell us about your day job.
Well, I am a full-time artist. But what people don’t realize about being a full-time artist is that you spend about 25 percent of your time creating and about 75 percent of your time hustling. I am constantly promoting myself, working on my website, sending out emails, trying to make contacts with people, following up on inquiries, all kinds of things. Teaching sometimes, too. It’s like not only am I an artist and trying to work in time to actually create my work, but I have to be a businessperson as well.
Locally, who would you like to collaborate with?
I’ve got the perfect answer to that question. I’d like to collaborate with Zap McConnell and Cindy Leal. They’re both dancers, and the funny thing is, when you interviewed them, they both said that they wanted to collaborate with me. So I’m returning the favor. But I really would like to work with them. I would like to work with dancers and performing artists. I did a lot of theater when I was a kid, and it’s something that I would like to do.
What is your first artistic memory from childhood?
When I was 7 years old, my parents took me to France. They took me to the Pompidou Centre, where there was this incredible kinetic sculpture called “The Crocodrome,” like crocodile. And it was this fantastical kinetic sculpture with an enormous crocodile head and it actually stood in this little fish contraption, which would shoot into the head, and it had all these moving gears and flashing lights and strange sculpture elements. It was just wonderful. It illustrated to me at an early age that art didn’t have to be stiff and academical, but that it could be a lot of fun.
What piece of public art do you wish were in your private collection?
My favorite piece of public art, at least locally, is a statue of St. Thomas Aquinas on Alderman Road, in front of St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church. It’s made out of car bumpers, and I have always loved that sculpture.
If you could have dinner with any person, living or dead, who and why?
I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at this famous dinner that took place in 1853, in the half-completed concrete Iguanodon in the sculpture park in the Crystal Palace in England, attended by the famous naturalists and paleontologists of the day. The Iguanodon and dinosaur sculptures are still there, even though the Crystal Palace burned down.
Favorite artist outside your medium?
That’s a really tough one. I’d say Richard Linklater. Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly, Slackers, those are all just brilliant films.
