by Jack Ricchiuto

With roots in Austin Texas and his MFA from Yale, 30-something Daniel Dove is on the faculty of the Cleveland Institute Of Art. His latest work is now featured at the Bonfoey Gallery through April 24, 2004.

What are you working on these days?
The imagery I've been working on since I've gotten to Cleveland is really based in landscape and I think I'm moving more toward exploring certain kinds of large communal interiors like mall spaces and smaller, more domestic suburban architecture.

What is it about your new direction that attracts you to it?
I'm attracted to this imagery, at least the mall, because I'm so alienated by it. Like a lot of contemporary artists, I feel that a mall is all about compelling desire, using beauty and design to stimulate desire regardless of need, which is a kind of desire that I generally feel alienated from. The mall is a massive gathering of various attempts to embed some sort of transcendence into consumer products, and it effectively becomes a manipulative surface of advertising instead of an architectural structure, which is an interesting tension.

How do you think your process is changing?
For the last few years, I've been dependent on photographic sources to form the source of my paintings, and what I can see happening in the future is moving away from dependence on photography towards working more intuitively, and more from direct observation. I think when you work in an intuitive fashion, when you get away from strict realism, it involves a lot more judgment on the part of the artist and a lot fewer solid, readily available criteria exist. So you have to develop your own rules and parameters. It involves being a lot more responsive to what you're seeing in front of you, or to your senses and ideas about what you're trying to make visible.

What do you like hearing most about your work?
I heard recently what I thought was a great one word compliment: "maddening". It seemed to suggest that I could make something that would seem intensely compelling and somehow out of the range of normal endeavors. I also like hearing that my work looks better in person than in reproduction, that the material manifestation of the painting is important to its effect.

Who do you admire? Whose work has influenced you the most?
For me the person who's been most influential has been Gerhard Richter, the German painter. And I've gone through other painters, like Lucian Freud, the British painter. Cezanne and Rembrandt were intense loves for me earlier on. Richter was able to take the world of reproduced representations and restore an emotional presence, even if that consisted in a sense of emotional loss. He deeply influenced my process, and I've tried to emulate everything I could, but now he's sort of my central problem, as any deeply felt influence can become in art.

What do you consider unique about your work?
I increasingly draw from different sources, and so my paintings become more hybrids of different influences. I would say I have a longer attention span and have more interest in the masterpiece than most painters my age. As to the question of uniqueness, I feel like I've just scratched the surface in my work. I think it's a lifelong journey to make a body a work that's been made by no one else, while living up to the standards set by great artists of the past.

Where do your ideas for new work come from?
I resist the tendency to mystify the moment of inspiration, or whatever you want to call it. But I still have to say that there is something unknowable and inscrutable about that moment when an idea is born. In my case it's visualizing; it's something that occurs to me whole as a complete, unified image and while it's never actually the thing you end up making, it can be close sometimes. It's a whole idea that comes out of the fragments of a lot of things you've been thinking about. And in a single, great, mysterious, and all-too-rare moment they seem to fuse and present themselves as a naturally self-organized thing.

Are there any best conditions to bring that about?
I think that's the only thing you can control; that you can maximize the possibilities for it. The key is to observe as much as possible - to be always looking at other artist's works, to always pay attention to films, videos, computer games, and any other parts of visual culture, and also to be thinking about it in your spare time. Any time you're going down the street, you're looking and thinking about whether or not something belongs in your world, whether you can use it. The first mode of inquiry is trying to always be alert and sensitized to the world. And then it's trying to be conscious of that, conscious of what provokes you, for any reason. The other thing is to be sketching a lot - doodling, drawing writing down ideas, always tinkering, because the tinkering gets you thinking in a visual mode and gives you the possibility of stumbling on something. That's what you're always hoping for - stumbling on the conditions for something that really works. So it's like you gather as much data as possible that, hopefully, comes together in an intelligent and poetic way. Artists are always working on their work when they’re not in the studio. Being an artist is really being sensitized all the time about the possibility that at any point you might come across the thing that becomes the key to the next work or body of works you do.

How does creativity enter into the problem solving part of your process?
When I’m in a quagmire in a picture and I have all these problems, I try to fool myself into seeing the piece in an unfamiliar way. I think a lot of artists do this, like looking in a mirror or taking it to a different room or in different light, or looking at it upside down. Often I'll put paintings away for 3 or 4 months in the middle of making them; it’s almost like you’re thinking about it on the back burner, but it appears fresh when you see it again, with more evident and specific problems.

Do you consider your process to be more planned or unplanned?
I think of it as a mix of structure and open-endedness. I do a lot of preparatory sketches and studies, but once the painting starts, I have no idea how long it will take. I have friends that work best under pressure; I like the luxury of feeling I can infinitely edit something and that I don’t have to be committed to the final version of my ideas because of the pressures of an exhibition. This way, I can perceive each question more deeply and be surprised by new problems along the way. This is becoming to me more common because I’m trying to be more intuitive in my process. It has to do with being open to the possibility that something might change its trajectory.

What role does critique play in the process?
The key, at least for artists like me, is to open up spaces in your process where you don’t critique. There’s a natural tendency to talk yourself out of ideas or to be harsh and paralysis-inducing. The ideal is to be critique-free at times and then critique-heavy at other times, and you go through this rhythm over and over again, you can use your imagination and judgment in alternating phases. Critique is not only negative judgment, it’s analysis, and a form of introspection.

If you could advise art students in the creative process, what would you suggest?
Open yourself up to anything as a possible influence, sketch a lot, write in your journal, be incredibly sensitized to the self and its responses to the world. Accept that 5 years from now, or in your next project, you might make something that isn’t very much like “your work”. And if you try to create a “self” in terms of a style, and if you desire that self remain a constant thing, you miss the opportunity to have a sense of constantly morphing, changing, and getting better. The artist at age 25 won’t necessarily be (and in all probability won’t be) the same as the one at 30 or 40. There is certain danger of a signature style. In staying creative, look at things you don’t normally look at and if you’re provoked or interested at all, it’s an indication that it might be useful.

from Cool Cleveland contributor Jack Ricchiuto jack@designinglife.com

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