Overcoming Adversity: A Conversation with Painter Ricardo Garcia
Anna C. Broome
The self as creator and man as painter is vigorously defined in the art of Ricardo Garcia. He is well developed as an artist in many forms and always extends the best of his creative self to the world. The evolution of the paintings rests on the process Garcia exposes through sequences of line and shape: mutually feminine and masculine; bold and tenacious; tender and fierce. “My art is a fusion of my life, environment, experience. When they ask me what kind of style I paint I tell them it’s a style that I cannot label.”
Chia 44×60 in.
The ideas he explores come from within as he initiates dialog with himself and the work. “Silence inspires me. I often have conversations with myself as a means of study of who I am as a man and a painter. I want to inspire the world to come to a place of harmony, and I think my art is a way of encouraging people to extend the best of who they are through the exposure of complex image and theme.”
Garcia’s work is stimulating as it affects each viewer differently. Stirring and alluring, the paintings depict subjects ranging from innocent children finding innovative play to Los Angeles landscapes to captivating women contemplating gender roles.
U.R.B.U.T 48×48 in
Garcia knows the feminine as every woman he paints denotes a doleful expression and learned pose where purity, disparagement, sorrow, wisdom, and ecstacy all exist mutually and courageously. The feminine in Garcia’s work bends and confronts the facts and theories of life for the female and all her surroundings, experiences as heroines, mothers, daughters and not as victims or survivors as they engage a sense of self and other.
His work is always evolving, “My art is changing all the time; that is the only constant. As I change, it changes. Emotional expression is a part of it, but it is really everything. The reflection of myself. Where I am in life. It has to start with me. My ideas..”
Focusing on his paintings, fastidious line, color, brush-stroke and contrasting subjects and subject matter fill every inch of space in aspects of cross-examination asking questions about the difference between life and living; giving and taking; passion and awareness; vulnerability and strength.
Los 53×64 in.
His work battles not only the catastrophes of quality of life, the internal struggle exemplified through art, conversations with himself and contemporary topical thinkers and philosophers but also the lurking and even provocative nature involved in seeing the world through an artist’s eyes and all the contribution and exploration that demands. “I break that image apart. Break those rules. For me to explore. Line as a living thing. Not counting a line as a perfect thing but as beautiful as an emotion being recorded.”
A native Angeleno, Garcia has a first-hand account of hard living and the obstacles placed on people in everyday life in a big city wrought with all the particulars involved with a large, struggling population. “I concluded for myself the way the world influences my work and how I perceive truth: Appreciation of an emotional conscious state of mind at that moment. Just being cold: A lot of people would complain about being uncomfortable, but to me it means I am experiencing life. How much more can I as living person do than feel life. Through my art I expect to be more human.”
Simple Amusement 47×52 in.
Standing in front of his work the subjects interact with the viewer in a logical and romantic manner. Women sitting politely, legs crossed, hands folded, eyes seeking, posture so perfect as to be on the verge of revolt. Colors fight at forceful, demonstrative angles as lines brightly and decisively explain the certainty of perception and value of continuity and message. Color as truth entices not only at first glance but in a continual and continuous relationship-based fashion established immediately and permanently. The lines play though exact and determined each of many initiate a dialog both intimate and gregarious — an almost magnanimous style as line subjects form in a geometric servitude depicting the situation in life in which we all find ourselves: caught in the cursed confusion of being the antagonist versus the protagonist.
Untitled 36×48 in.
With shows all over Los Angeles and murals contracts pouring in, Garcia sees his future as an artist not controlled by the curator, critic or audience, but by the power of his brush and the focus of his intent to create, “I’m a conductor not of music but of Art. Conducting my own symphony, not with a baton but with a brush.”
Picasso said, “Art begins with the individual. When the individuality appears, that’s the beginning of art.” This is the philosophy of painter Ricardo Garcia. He is the essence of his own creations starting with the idea of self as a human being and then as an artist. He lives in his own mind formulating ideas and putting down on canvass that which he understands as truth and reality. He endures the complexities of his endeavors and simplifies thought and execution in order to strike a balance between himself as a man with the obligation to change the world through his art and conducting his life in a manner contiguous with setting an example for humanity.
Ricardo Garcia’s website is https://www.ricardola.com/
Photography of by Rick Mendoza http://rickmendoza.com
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
