CΔCHING UP with Diane Richey-Ward

On Sunday, July 16, 2017, THE CACHE paid a visit to local artist, teacher, and influential woman, Diane Richey-Ward. We were welcomed into her studio and had the pleasure of discussing her art practice, career, and visual arts of the Sacramento region.

THE CACHE: Thank you for letting us come into your home and interview you this afternoon, and for being our first featured artist. Now to get started, are you originally from the Sacramento region? (Brittni)

Various Anxieties - Manic Wednesday, 2017, Charcoal and Pastel on Paper, 52"x 72"

DIANE: I grew up in the Bay Area, and moved up to Sacramento for my husband’s graduation business. I used to have a photography business in the Bay Area, and specialized in portraits and weddings. I would have preferred to work on black and white prints in my darkroom-but couldn’t find a way to make that profitable!  After doing the portrait business for a few years I realized I didn’t enjoy how my customers had such pre-conceived ideas of what they looked like, and decided I needed a new direction.So when the kids were in elementary school I decided to get my Master’s in Studio Art at Sac State. I never regretted going back to school in my forties- even though I was older than everyone it didn’t seem to matter. It was such a great decision since I was able to obtain a full-time teaching position at American River College and I loved being able to talk about art all day long.

C: Absolutely, us too! That's why we're investing in THE CACHE, because we want to talk about art with everybody all the time. (Brittni)

D: Oh yeah, and you know, that doesn't go away. It's not like twenty years from now you're going to think, "I don't want to talk about art right now." When I started teaching part-time after Sac State, I found that there was a huge need for teaching beginning art appreciation courses which turned out to be my meal ticket so to speak. After a few years, I was able to secure Teaching Abroad gigs where I would travel to Europe with Northern California students for a semester. I was lucky enough to teach drawing and art history in Paris, Barcelona, London and Florence.

C: What a dream! (Brittni)

D: And it was! Have you ever thought about teaching?

C: We have a very similar story actually. I was originally a photography major. I decided that I didn't want to take portraits of people because I didn't want to meet their expectations, as an artist I wanted to do photography the way I wanted to do it. So I changed my major to Art History, and I am looking into getting my Master's so I can teach because my fiance owns his own  business... so I'm thinking of getting my Master's for the same reason! (Victoria)

D: Well one of the reasons I tell these stories is because I always think it might help somebody else because it made a huge difference in my life. That way you can have income in a field that you like. I thought about getting my degree in something else, but I've always been an artist. Well photography first, and when I graduated from high school I got a scholarship to a college in SF that was based on drawing and photography, so then I guess the rest is history. You go to school and get your degree, and you teach. Of course in order to teach, you had to have developed your artwork to a point that by looking at your work, it looks like you know something...

Factory Distractions, 2017, Charcoal/Pastel, Archival Digital Print

C: Yes, that you know what you’re saying and how you're saying it visually, right? (Brittni)

D: And that your work is important enough visually that you can relate that to your students.

C: Did you pick Sac State for your Master's for proximity reasons then? (Brittni)

D: Absolutely. (Pause) Some of my friends went on to get their MFA’s, which is the terminal degree for fine art, but that didn’t quite work out for me at the time. I would have liked to teach at the University level. It makes a huge difference when you're trying to get a job, so if you can just take that and pass that on.

C: Having taught and shown your work both locally and internationally for a number of years, can you describe how your artwork has evolved into what you are practicing today? (Brittni)

D: I've always been interested in mixing media, whether that was drawing and sculpture, drawing and photography, drawing and collage...so what happened was over the course of the last twenty years, the bottom line has always been drawing, but for a while I could never let the drawing stand by itself. I felt that it needed to be more contemporary by mixing multiple media together. I would create a drawing and hang some wires between it, so you'd be looking through this boxed frame through these wires at the drawing. Then I moved onto a series of drawings on transparent plexi-glass and layered those into collages. ARC has most of that series, I like it because I am interested in making something you've never seen before. It's really hard because everything has been done. So every five to ten years I move into a slightly different medium...well right now, I feel like this particular combination of drawing and photography is my favorite. It's absolutely what is meant for me to be doing. It's because those are my two favorite visual vehicles. Looking through a lens of a camera and raw mark making. The visual potential of combining a particular set of lines/marks and a particular section of a photograph is enormous- and unlimited! Lately I’ve been leaning toward more non-objective mark-making- which I find challenging to combine with photographs.

C: You're pretty excited about what you’re working with right now, and with good reason too. This style definitely captivated our interest as well, seeing the architecture, movement, and dynamism of the layered image… (Brittni)

C: Yes and the deconstruction. (Victoria)

D: Well that's what's so interesting, I like that deconstructive aspect. What can you take away and what can you put back into it to make these things go together? And what can you do to the combination to make it be the most powerful, and not just visually, but with multiple possible interpretations. But the raw mark making thing I was talking about…with making something new, formal abstraction is appealing to me right now. What can you erase? What can you add? What can you erase? What can you add? Part of why I love teaching and traveling abroad so much is because I would shoot all these pictures, and then I would have so much material to choose from and use as source material for my drawing. This summer coming up, I'm doing a residence in Holland, and I've been to that same residency before. I was afraid that the images that I took there wouldn't be new enough, but all you have to do is get on a train and I can go to Germany to take factory pictures. I love factories, old buildings and machines. Last time I was there, I drew ducks because the whole community was filled with these beautiful swans walking down the street. All these lakes and swans! Of course I have moved away from birds now. Last year in Valencia, the reason I went there was because of Calatrava's architecture. His work makes movement through three dimensional form. So this residency really inspired my turn in this direction, and I think I can use my photographs of his structures for another couple of years.

C: What is the significance of the materials you choose to work with? Order of application? Scale? Why are you working with what you're working with? (Brittni)

Love Potion,
2017, Charcoal/Pastel, Archival Digital Print

D: There's a really simple reason why I work with charcoal and pastel, because that is my main love. It's so obvious, but it's such a direct medium. Whatever is going on in your mind, comes out in your hand in the most direct fashion. Charcoal and pastel mark-making is so direct and connected with gesture/movement/feeling. Cutting out the middle man of liquid medium/etc, keeps the flow of ideas running in a straightforward manner. My friend, Mick Sheldon does an incredible Lino-cut printmaking process which requires many time-consuming steps which alter the flow of immediacy- but he enjoys it and utilizes this process to express himself in a powerful way. He doesn't mind all those layers and the process, whereas I, I like a more direct process. My three-step process involves: creating the drawing first, projecting a photograph onto the drawing, and then finding the right moment/combination to click the shutter.

C: Now that you are retired, do you think you will keep Sacramento as your home base? (Brittni)

D: Well I don't know yet, I am considering starting my own residency in France. With all the residencies I've done, I've spent about a third of the year over the past twenty years out of the country, maybe to the detriment of some of my community and gallery connections here. If you're gone half of the year, you don't have as many close ties, and I feel a bit disillusioned with the current situation of the U.S…. but we don't know yet.

C: We have a few questions about regional art because our blog is about the community of Sacramento. How do you find yourself contributing to the arts of this region? (Victoria)

D: That's a good question...I taught for twenty-three years, and I think that I'm generally proud of my drawing tradition. One of the biggest things that happened when I graduated from Sac State was that they wanted me to graduate in painting because painting is more of a bonafide art medium in the minds of the professors. They liked abstraction, they liked large-scale, and they liked painting.

C: They are definitely still teaching that. (Brittni)

D: Yes, loose abstraction, almost ab-ex (abstract expressionism). When they said you need to be painting, I said “no” I am going to get out with my degree in drawing, and this was 1990. How I got my degree was to make them huge, I had that scale element. But back in those days they thought of drawing as a preparation medium, a lesser medium, so I had a couple of friends who would go to NY and say that they were seeing charcoal drawings hung in the galleries. So I hung onto that hope, to think that a gallery would give me a show on drawing. For me, I believe that I am contributing to the medium of drawing. Usually people start with drawing as a sketch. I think it’s the gateway drug to art making. That's why it was important to me to teach drawing at ARC, to introduce the medium.

C: What would you like to see happen in the arts in this region? (Victoria)

D: Second Saturday has revitalized the arts, and I'm sure it seems totally common for every city to have a monthly art gathering, but it wasn't like that twenty years ago. So Second Saturday brought a level of sophistication to everyday people, it changed the way art was seen in Sacramento. Anything more in that direction would be a good idea. I think that enlarging the Crocker Art Museum was a big step. Now they have the space to bring a range of works and shows. Bigger names, more interesting shows like the current Hi-Fructose exhibit – fantastic! I think that more museums and contemporary art centers and bringing in artists and artworks from other areas, not just local, is important too because it can expand our own horizons here in Sacramento.

C: What do you think is holding Sacramento back? (Victoria)

D: I'll tell ya, and I have one answer...the auction, the system of how art is being sold in Sacramento. In my opinion, I feel strongly about this, the Crocker is one of the biggest culprits. They have this beautiful auction once a year and all the patrons of the arts go to the auction and they buy artists’ works at huge discounts because it's for a good cause. The Crocker isn't actually the worst, its other organizations having benefit auctions. They want you to donate, so the community can buy artwork cheaper, and it's ostensibly for a good cause, but it's infiltrating into the economy and the artists can't make any money because they can't sell their artwork in a regular gallery, and the galleries are closing right and left because the biggest thing holding Sacramento back from being a larger and more important art city is the lack of buying in the galleries. The artists have to donate these pieces, and the cost of making art is unbelievable!

C: This is an interesting and new perspective to hear. It makes me wonder if the audience here is not connecting the artist as a person with a means and a need to create for their living. I can't wait to make money so I can buy art, I purposefully want to save so I can support the artists, and build a collection! (Brittni)

D: If you start now, you will have an incredible body of work. If you start getting the pieces when they are starting out, you can amass a whole lot. Now what I like about social media and Instagram especially, is that you can get a lot of eyes to see your work. Some guy in Tasmania can see your work who's similar to yours, and you can find kindred spirits all around the world. I just love it, it's amazing to get instantaneous feedback from across the world.

C: That connectivity is so important in all these areas, but I think especially for visual artists to get their work out there. I mean, look at how it got us connected! I don't know how we would've really been exposed to your work otherwise, or as directly if it wasn't for our communication through Instagram. (Brittni)

D: Bottom line is, is it working? Yes. Is it contributing to your work? Yes. Is it contributing to you being inspired by having all those eyes on your work? Yes.

C: In closing, we would like to simply know what it means to you to be an artist. (Brittni)

D: As an artist, I think of myself as an explorer, it's my job to find new things. It's not very complicated. It's constantly an investigative process. I'm not trying to make any broad conceptual notions, I don't have those floating in my head. I'm a really formal artist, I like formal elements. I'm really interested in the 20th century picture plane, I'm attracted to those types of investigations, like Picasso and Leger. Now even though those have been done, I haven't done them yet, so you know what I mean, it may not be new art historically to work with the surface, but I just keep thinking the next great thing is right around the corner. It's always right around the corner, and the day that I don't think that anymore is the day I will probably stop.

Diane Richey-Ward in her studio.

For more information on Diane Richey-Ward and her artwork, go to her website https://www.dianericheyward.net/ and watch her regularly upload new work on Instagram @pitcheywart . 

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