Time to Get Serious

I've been putting this post off almost from the beginning, because it doesn't really fit the tone of this blog, but it's time to talk about Richard Grieco's painting.

It turns out that standing around and looking pretty is not the man's main talent. And I say that with no intended slight...he's just really, really good at standing around and looking pretty.  But he's better with a paintbrush.  Errr...a paintsomething.  I'm not at all sure that he's using brushes--certainly not exclusively.

I expected Grieco's artwork to be decent. In my experience creative people are...well...creative.  I don't know many artists who have just one talent.  I didn't, however, expect to think, "Hey, I need that in my living room...I could buy a black couch. And, you know, replace the wood with something in lacquer or chrome. Yeah, that would go better." 

This is not a biased view.  I know that for sure because while I was looking at the paintings--and I looked at every one--I sort of forgot how I'd gotten there.  I forgot that I was stalking Richard Grieco and became entirely immersed in the work.  I do not believe--and I was surprised by this--that these paintings are selling for tens of thousands of dollars because Richard Grieco painted them. I think they're selling because they're the kind of art people want to acquire.

 

You should check them out yourself, if you haven't.  But here are just a few of the things that intrigued me:

 

Most of my favorite pieces feature masses of fine lines more or less obscuring the canvas.  Aesthetically, they're attention-catching, but what really caught my attention about these pieces is that many of them give the sense of having something else underneath.  Maybe the something else is abstract, maybe it's only an idea--hell, maybe it's only an idea in my mind and I'm reading too much in.  But I get a sense of layers, of something buried beneath those tangled lines.  It makes me want to look more closely, to catch a glimpse of what it is, even though I'm not at all sure that it's really there.

 

I also found the titles more interesting than I do most, because so many of them could easily be taken two ways, and the painting feeds the interpretation of the title and vice versa.

 

Grieco describes these paintings as unfiltered emotion, and I don't disbelieve him.  However, there is at the same time an element of subterfuge about them, as if someone has written his secrets on a page and then scrawled over them so that they're fully expressed without being fully understood.