What are these paintings about?
100 years is a long time for an individual human but not necessarily a long time for nature.
Nature usually refers generally to plants and animals. In science, especially in fields like physics and chemistry, nature can also mean light and gravity and even mathematical concepts. Both of these definitions evoke an absence of human observation. Nature is what happens when we’re not looking, or more precisely, it’s what happens whether we’re looking or not.
These paintings are an attempt to broaden the idea of nature even further. I think that, for example, literature is part of nature. Insofar as I put narratives into my work, those narratives usually come from plays or historical events. I especially like doing paintings based on plays because a play is like an invitation.
The opposite of imagination
What Wallace Shawn calls the “windowless miniature world”
What medium are these?
Oil paint, almost always on masonite or wood panels
Do you employ the metric system?
The dimensions given on this website are in inches.
Do you sell your work?
I do. The price depends on how long it took to make. Bigger works are more expensive…shipping is possible or perhaps if you’re ever in Brooklyn you might visit in real life?
Which species of plants does one see in your paintings?
Tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), paper birch, honey locust…sycamore, pine…
What does LIBERTAS QUAE SERA TAMEN mean?
It’s Latin for “Liberty albeit late.” It’s the motto of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.
What’s up with the eyeballs?
It’s a paradox: as we humans learn more about nature we find more reason to question our traditional view of ourselves as outside of it. Using our usual tools, articulation and analysis, to understand non-human perspectives can be uplifting and useful but it necessarily means using a conceptual framework to understand non-conceptual frameworks. And so the distinction vanishes the more you try to focus on it. Mixed up in all of this is the concept of pareidolia, which is when we look at like random patterns on a carpet or whatever and the patterns resemble human or animal figures.
For me, painting eyeballs on buckets and whatnot is half giving up and half rebellion.
What is your email?
rhysziemba@gmail.com. You can call or text me if you want. 347-756-2470. Thanks for looking.