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..........The art from my Rome period, 1991 to now, is a development of my work from the past, growing out of an exploration based on the two mediums of photography and painting. My work is multifaceted, involving color, light, spirit, and continuity.
..........My art is abstract, mainly watercolor and gouache on paper. Recently an art critic described my color style as "post-traditional abstraction." There is a line in my work, a direction, whether it be "the happy accident", as one of my professors called it, or a conscious thought process. This direction is broad banded as in a wave length; the extended curve of each wave is, technically speaking, photography and painting. The rest of the curve is spiritual, and running through each wave is a line representing continuity.
..........I graduated from Southern Illinois University in 1976 with a Bachelor of Science in Fine Arts, Photography and Cinema, my final degree work was a series of Midwestern landscapes using modern graphic techniques combined with a late 19th century, hand-coated process. These concentrated on the interaction of man with nature; six pieces were acquired by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 1977 for their permanent collection.
..........In 1978 I started using a 5 x 7 inch (12.5 x 17.5 cm) view camera to explore the urban landscape. I named the series Paper Negatives because I used the photographic paper as the negative, i.e., all the whites were black and all the blacks were white. The resulting abstract images defied easy interpretation, being close-up details of urban man-made objects that had interacted with nature. I moved to a larger view camera in 1980 (11 x 14 inches, 28 x 35.5 cm). The more detailed close-ups from the larger format emphasized the different colors within a black and white image. Intrigued with this, I began exploring color and actually painting on the paper negative itself with oil and watercolor, sometimes working in segments. I used the whole process to previsualize how the final painted image would look and to represent my concept of fragments in the environment. I soon began experimenting with color paper negatives -- researching a process which most experts and commercial photographers held to be unfeasible. I painted on glass, took a color paper negative of this painting and then broke the glass, leaving the photo as the only existing image.
..........Painting on glass inevitably led to painting on canvas and paper. I went to France in 1986 and created a new series concentrating on color, using watercolor, gouache, dry pastel, oil pastel, and charcoal. This work was geometric and hard-edged. Returning to America I continued to work in this theme in Florida where the bright light influenced the colors even more. After getting some recognition with Museum shows in Tampa, Daytona, and the Cornel Museum in Winter Park, Florida, and being acquired by the Tampa Museum and the Cornel Museum, I decided to return to Europe.
..........Since coming to Rome in 1991, the Mediterranean light has influenced me strongly, softening the hard-edge quality of my paintings. I began a series of abstract monotypes, using watercolors and gouache on glass, then painting on the image derived from the glass painting, returning to my earlier idea of markings on markings. The colors flowed richer and better in this process, giving harmonious and balanced images.
..........My latest work explores the techniques of watercolor, gouache, and dry pigments applied directly to paper. Some paintings are larger (47 x 32 in - 120 x 80 cm), and I have returned to the idea of segments, with triptychs and four-panel paintings. Still influenced by the two color systems and the idea of randomness, I continue to explore the ongoing reaction with color and light.
..........This work continues to push, technically, the use of commercial and handmade paints applied to different papers and the interaction with the wet on wet technique. I am also now experimenting with the same style in oils. Philosophically for me this work is about creating order out of randomness.
I hope this gives the reader a better understanding of someone who has had a lifelong dedication to the principles of creating art - that this philosophy in my view pushes and explores the process of color and paint by reexamining it, no matter whether it is in vogue or not. When I take my work to the people it has always been accepted without any confining mind-set, seeing through all the processes to what I am really trying to achieve, beauty....................Wayne Riggs - 2001
..........I started working in photography some thirty odd years ago. What first comes to mind is actually a very early black and white photograph that was taken, developed and printed when I was around 16. I remember it was a view of an old shed on the farm, the summer kitchen. It was a close-up of a window with no glass in it. The frame of the window had little or no paint on it and the white of the walls had been washed out long ago. Through the window was a double sink resting on the bottom sill, tipping downwards out toward the ground. The sink itself was old, but modern in the sense that it wasn't thick enamel but steel, so the bottom being black and the top being white cast a certain shadow onto the window. The faucets were still on it and were turned every which direction. In the sink that was outside the window, was a potted plant that drooped down over the edge going down and out of the picture frame. At the top of the window and the top of the picture frame was a piece of ivy coming from inside the shed; like a snake it wound its way downward towards the sink. This was not, of course, my first picture ever, but one that I do remember. As I look back on it now, I guess why I remember it is because of the randomness of it, the idea of a window with no glass, the idea of a sink in the window, the idea of a pot in a sink. Those random placements of these things - my father throwing the sink on the window sill because it was in the way, my mother putting a pot in the sink because it looked like a good place for a plant, I don't know. I took a picture of it because it was interesting; although at the time I only guessed it was interesting. It was only after I saw the picture did I know it was, and then it is only now that I write about it. I write about it because I remember it, not the image per se but the randomness of the image.
..........It is randomness and order that has been one of the main focuses in my work throughout my career. Whether it was in the early landscapes, dealing with man verses nature or vice versa, and how their placement created tension and harmony, or the abstract paper negative images involving manmade objects and how the randomness of nature reacted to those surfaces, and again how man reacted to those reactions.
..........In either case I selected what those images were going to be, as they were found images. In the landscapes they were issues that I found interesting and compelling that spoke to me. In the paper negatives they were images that I found, thinking that they would be interesting as I was perceiving them in positive knowing they would end up in negative. I was beginning to manipulate. First, with my eye and then with my hand, by later adding color to the images as a separate mark, adding markings onto markings.
..........When I moved into painting from photography I was fascinated by color and layering building color upon color using mixed media and hardedge geometric forms. Later while in Italy I softened the edges using a wet on wet technique and exploring the process of color and paint by reexamining it and exploring older processes using dry pigments.
..........In the end I hope that people will see that all the processes are a means to an end and that what I am really trying to achieve is harmony, balance and beauty...........Wayne Riggs - 2004
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