Richard Prince
Richard Prince: Ripple Paintings
$65
"The Ripple Paintings.
Not your everyday semi-realistic preparatory plaster castor fresco with a splash of satiric humor over a Whitney Darrow caricature.
Sidebar: Darrow is one of Richard’s “fab’s”. A longtime New Yorker cartoonist. He was also Jackson Pollock’s roommate.
A little of this. A little of that.
How hard can it be?
The Ripple Paintings are in the middle of two bodies of work. The first body… Super Group. The third body… High Times. The Ripple Paintings were made between 2015 and 2017. Richard Prince told me “the rips” started off (“Major Tom’d”), by collecting cartoons published in Playboy. Cartoons that were originally published between the years 1967 and 1970. “Three years that I remember, revisit, still think about. The turn on, turn up years. The years the circle replaced the square. The years the groove moved the twist and the uptight and upright lost its vote. The years Mr. Jones didn’t know what hit him. These years opened up and let me out. Man, I felt like I cleaned house. All the phony baloney shot out of my ass. All my life I had been lied too. Now I was awake. I was receptive. And all I needed was something to agree with. Between 1967 and 1970 I agreed to say no.”
“I’ve been working on the railroad.”
Richard told me it was a simple idea.
“The cartoons that were submitted to the magazine were watercolors. That’s what washanded in, delivered to the art director. It was how they were made. Gouache on illustration board. Sketch, wash, and punch line. I bought the magazines on e-bay. I bought thirty-six issues. I flipped thru the magazine and tore my favorite “toons” out of the magazine, put the torn page on the floor, and poured more watercolor on the cartoon. Water on water. My red watercolor on their yellow cartoon. Fifty/fifty. My contribution? My psychotic breakdown of my psychic connection. Also a contrasting color. My red water on their yellow water. I would come back the next morning and my red would dry in its own way. It had personality. Travel, leak, pool, stains and puddles. And on the way to drying, the dry would ripple the paper. The pour would do its thing. A secret ‘cover’. The drying stayed up all night. Land of a thousand dances. The spread of my watercolor really didn’t have to do with me. It was independent. The form had a life of its own, a mind of its own, and each morning after ‘the evaporation’… I got a surprise.”
“Trippy.”
I asked Richard if he could pass The Acid Test.
“Probably not.”
“I’ve always been a fan of Ken Kesey. ‘It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.’ ‘And when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.’
But I’m late to the Grateful Dead. I just started listening.”
Then he went on a little Birdtalk about the Ripples."
Published by Gladstone Gallery, 2019
Paperback
English
201 pages
14 x 10.6 inches; 36 x 27 cm
ISBN 978-0-578-46465-7
