ART AND LIFE — By Richard Lau. “I make art because it is a lot of fun. It allows me to freely explore thoughts and feelings. When I paint, I live in my special world of magic and mythology. For me, the creative process has no rules or boundaries. I just do it. It makes me happy. It makes me smile. Sometimes, it makes me laugh.
I really feel at ease within myself when I ‘get into’ what I’m creating. I’m transported to another world. (Kinda like reading a great book you can’t put down.) I’m comforted by a feeling of inner calm and relief. Now I can watch the painting and help it grow. I currently reside with my pet cat and parakeet. My present cat and two other cats I had were rescues I adopted from an animal rescue organization I volunteered with for over ten years.
When I was first contacted by Dr. Miescher about joining an artist group I was ecstatic. This was during the 2012 winter holiday season and I thought it was the best Christmas present I had ever received. The timing was perfect since I wasn’t doing anything to relieve my idleness. My enrollment in 137ac reunited me with many artist friends. It has been liberating for me to work at our studio. I can choose to work in solitude and privacy when desired but the opportunity is always available if I need the emotional benefits of engaging with my fellow artists. It helps me to avoid unhealthy over-isolation. Involvement with 137ac has given me a new direction in life. I feel more alive and vital being part of something outside of myself. Painting helps me to get in touch with my emotions.
Richard Lau was born in New York City in 1957; he lived his entire life there, and attended NYC public schools. He attended Bronx High School of Science and Columbia University, majoring in architecture. He is still very interested in the sciences and humanities, particularly psychology and Buddhism. Richard has suffered from chronic depression since 1978. Lau has a reverence for nature and an abiding fascination with forms and patterns in the natural world (one of his childhood toys was a microscope). He also enjoys hiking and bird watching. A self taught photographer and painter, he has been taking pictures for the past forty years. As a child, he enjoyed drawing and watercolor painting. Watercolor is still one of his favorite mediums.
There are the facts of life, and words swirl around them as if an artist’s life could be explained like a stream of water from the source. It doesn’t. There are words and words, also: the ones trying to reflect what’s real about mountains, cars and birds and subway trains, and the ones that eat the bug of uncertainty.
These are light like falling petals, often forgetting which flower they belonged to. They only want to float on the paintings, and grasp the voices, the whispers diluted in colors. Quiet, they are invisible daughters of reading and mothers of new images to be imagined.
The parable of green, a special green almost turquoise, is the leitmotif of some of Richard’s paintings and drawings; bright and cold, this color gives access to an invisible state of mind that brings unexpected visual fruits, a banquet of feelings. Meditation is a story, a still life, a poem of animal souls merged into the canvas. Red, white, yellow and some blue are let free to float in a world without weight. The white soul of the cat on the floor, white like the lips of the two masks (Untitled) that contain and release a scream of terror, is there for the unspeakable story we can’t tell until we meet her, it’s the color of death. In this painting, white is a spot of sweetness shared by the pink figure on the left, and reinforced by the fact that the white soul is still dreaming, what else? A fish! The turquoise green around her head, embracing her shape with a delicate green line, gives to lady cat, and to us, a shiver of tenderness.
A different story appears when blue and yellow are violently separate, and do not become green, that particular peaceful color. The human head is on fire, the face is a mask that covers unspeakable fears.
A different story again when the white only brings up mystery with no fear, or maybe the power of silence. When I look at Shadows, I see them motionless in front of the friendly silences of the moon (per amica silentia lunae by William Butler Yeats), immersed in silence for the painted time.
But in the end, I’m sure that Richard Lau truly loves his painting when his mind looks for a steady place to hang all the possible noisy feelings. It’s an explosion of undefined things, a rain of broken forms stuck in the sky, incapable of finding the ground, and still it’s life. It is drama and it is joy. How many secrets we don’t want to disclose. Others, our human nature knows them better than our mind. Shall we ask for answers?
The portrait of Richard Lau painted by Janet Laing, another artist of the 137ac collective, is extremely insightful: she placed his bust in a stream of green, softening the image’s horizontal cut, and painted a necklace of green around his neck. Janet gave me the key.