Even KRK Ryden’s bathroom walls are hand painted in comic book panels. Elsewhere, a collection of convenience store-boughtnovelty lighters are positioned like circling sharks has invaded a brightly colored coffee table.
The kitchen refrigerator, long removed from the premises to make room for the wall of mousetraps; each room, nay, each exposed surface or wall trimming is painted its own distinct color. Alone, the colors are obnoxiously garish, but together, they compliment each other like a neon bouquet in Paris. Windows and curtains always drawn, the conductor KRK Ryden creates his work surrounded by a kaleidoscope symphony of his own choosing. The odd ephemera, expertly placed knick knacks, and spectrum-colored walls would appear as the ultimate distraction for a meditating Zen Buddhist, but for KRK, it makes the coziest of homes.
KRK’s paintings are like his house/studio. Experiments in controlled chaos, bursts of expertly displayed clutter, arranged by color, pattern, size, and theme. Each has its own push and pull on your eye and brain.
I sat down with KRK to interview him for Hi-Fructose as we ate a bowl of fresh popcorn, heavy on the butter. We were in a room crammed top to bottom with Sharpie labeled VHS cassettes and DVDs of titles like: “Hot Rod Girl”, “Fiend of Dope Island”, and “The World of Tomorrow”. (It’s been a dream of KRK’s to host a Saturday night Creature-Feature TV show). There are stacks of cartoons too: “Gigantor,” “Colonel Bleep,” and old “Betty Boop” when she still sported a dog’s head. Some have handwritten reviews by KRK on them, “cutting edge animation, but the music score ruined this fl ick!” Or like the review for “The Return”: “like watching grass grow while having prickly heat, but not as exciting.”
Atta: [Pointing to one of the DVDs] A few months back you leant me a DVD collection of the badly animated (but in hindsight, surreal) Klutch Cargo series. It’s insane that to cut corners on animating the dialog, they inset clips of an actual human mouth! This reminds me of your paintings, where you place elements completely out of context, and even, in completely different styles/realities into the same painting.
KRK: Badly animated!? Klutch would be insulted. It was actually cutting-edge television animation, the predecessor of limited animation years before The Flintstones. It just looked funky because of their little experiment with lips. Sometimes the cell vinyl color didn’t come close to matching the fl esh tone of the people actually doing the voice-overs. Klutch made it into the film Pulp Fiction; it was used in a scene that needed a choice example (albeit odd) of an early 60s kid’s show.
My art does have a layered, cut-and-paste look to be sure. Years ago, I thought the “dropping in” of cartoon or comic book art and the occasional ad art illustration in a realistically painted piece wouldn’t work. Sometimes it’s vice-versa; a realistic image like a portrait in the foreground is superimposed on a comic book panel. As I forced the images together in time, I developed a technique that fused them together in a way that made visual and artistic sense. I experimented with paint application and style so that the overlapping welded together.
For example, a comic book figure will be outlined with a color that conforms with a color of the fi eld behind it. Real clever stuff like that.
Atta: Each piece, when gathered together, seems to provide evidence for the bigger story…
KRK: It is evidence. Puzzling evidence. You’ve got to put all the paintings in a big room to get the picture. That’s how you can see the story unfold. I’ll lose track of the tale myself unless I can see everything together like that. Da Vinci said that when an artist’s imagination soars far beyond his ability to create that vision, it’s a good thing. I’ve got far-flung ideas that in time will come to fruition. With time and lots of money, those dreams will be turned into reality.
Atta: A major KRK Ryden piece wouldn’t be complete without your handmade, fantasy, fur-wrapped frames, with surprise shadow boxes with recessed areas often silhouetted in a skylark blobbed shape. On paper that sounds horrible but in actuality, the frames are wonderful and I couldn’t imagine the paintings presented any other way.
KRK: Allow me to reveal to the world how I make fur frames. To begin, I should explain the source of the fur frame concept. I was in SF MOMA looking at beat art from the 50s. There was a smallish piece that had its frame coated with a dark brown fur—it might have been rabbit. I can’t remember the artist or what the art looked like, but I’ll never forget that totally unreal and ultra-cool frame. It reminded me of Duchamp’s fur-lined teacup. I had thought of doing something like that before, but seeing the thing crystallized that way encouraged me to pursue and develop it.
I start by drawing and cutting out a paper template. The shape is usually googie style, like an elephant ear. The template is used to create a plywood form. The edges of the wood are sanded and made round. I get most of my material from a humongous fabric store in the Mission district in SF.
They’ve got a lot of rare and bizarre fabrics. The material is layed down on a large flat area (like a fl oor) face down and sprayed with a cancer-causing and ozone-destroying 3M adhesive spray. The plywood cutout is deftly dropped on the fabric and pressure is applied. I cut away the excess fur about an inch from the wood, like shearing sheep. The material is flapped around the edge and stapled upholstery style. If the fur is long it needs to be combed out with a toothbrush before it’s hung up. All the fur I use is fake, because real fur is murder to clean.
A complicated form might be rendered in monotones while a simple shape, when approached from the left or right side, will reveal an odd sanded texture or a literal hole in the picture plane, inhabited by the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
I paint almost exclusively on masonite. That gives me the freedom to cut out shapes and create multi-leveled art. They’re reliefs. I’ll cut a hole out of a piece from the picture surface, and back it up with another painting behind. That’s something that can’t be done with canvas easily.
There’s a painting technique that my brother Mark turned me onto about 15 years ago. Paint an area with a thick coat of paint, being conscious of the brush strokes, controlling their direction and pattern. After that primary coat is bone dry, the image you initially planned to do is painted over it, basically ignoring the undercoat, which is usually of a lighter value. After that part is done and dry, fine sandpaper is used to sand and reveal the first layer of pigment.
Another trick is to backlight or electrify the art. Behind the cut out masonite pieces white lights are arranged and attached to illuminate glass or plexi. As the construction of these pieces evolve, I hope to introduce more complex technology. I want to use fl at screen TVs with CGI that integrate with the painting. For example, a scene that portrays a window in a room may have clouds moving by with an occasional bird in fl ight via a monitor built into the painting. This is a future goal. I’d like to build in motion-activated software that produces sounds and programmed lighting emitting from the art.