Photo by Richard Thomasson ~ Design by Raul Gomez

Portrait of the Artist as an Everyman

By Richard Schaan
Contributing Writer

In reality, as defined by careless Hollywood screenwriters, all old rich men wear ascots, all police captains are gruff but lovable black guys, and all visual artists are over-the-top extroverts, stealing average Joe’s girlfriend with their combination of obnoxious ego and smarmy charm. In a reality defined by, well—Reality— this may be the most difficult-to-prove stereotype of them all. It is not merely a simplistic exaggeration of artists’ traits, but in most cases, it’s nearly the complete opposite of them.

Local photographer and print maker Richard Thomasson represents a much more accurate (if less useful for banal comedy) archetype of the visual artist: nervous, introspective, a little too intelligent to put all he has to say into words and tragically humble compared to the the self-inflated hacks that populate the realms of pop music and blockbuster movies.

The snooty artist and art gallery stereotype is so widespread that even artists themselves, Thomasson included, mistakenly believe the myth at times.

“I thought some galleries were pushing that culture, so I looked for alternative ways to market my work,” he said.

Avoiding the local gallery scene at first, Thomasson concentrated on his website (cosmicjuju.com), which he thought would bring his work to a larger audience and, hopefully, to possible buyers.

“I thought after the website was done, it would just pop, but nothing really happened,” he said. “Now it’s popping a little after I got my work in public.”

Thomasson’s discovery—that local human networks still have value in a world obsessed with global wireless ones—forced him to reconsider his stance on art galleries.

“I have may have been a bit conceited in thinking that galleries were conceited,” he admitted.

“A Cosmic Sampler” at the Spirit Room

Thomasson’s first solo show, featuring around a dozen of his best pieces, opened at the Spirit Room on March 5 and runs through the end of May. Called a “sampler” because it acts as a preview to his much larger senior show that opens Thursday, May 12 at NDSU’s Memorial Union Gallery, the Spirit Room show has created a gradually increasing buzz over Thomasson’s unique and painstaking approach to photography.

Inspired by a high school chemistry experiment that involved making homemade lava lamps using kerosene, water, food coloring and two liter soda bottles, Thomasson has been experimenting with close-up photos of mixtures containing water, colorants, oils and syrups, resulting in galvanic images, many of which resemble the shots of deep space taken by the Hubble telescope. As usual, however, the subject of the photos is secondary to that one simple element that makes photography possible—light.

“If it’s lit improperly, all you see is the reflections off the liquid, not the liquid itself,” Thomasson said.

To get one shot worth printing, Thomasson snaps up to 1,500 exposures, toying with back lit shots taken from above and head on, above lighting with shots from the sides, and most frequently, placing his magic potions on a light table and shooting over and over from every angle in search of a single keeper. 

“I never know what I have until I get it on the computer,” he said. “Sometimes I see something through the camera that looks amazing but turns out to be garbage, and others I have no clue what I have, then I see it on the computer, and it’s just beautiful.”

The shots that survive are printed on large sheets of aluminum, a choice that makes the colors much more intense than on paper or a computer screen; perhaps that is why it took a little old fashioned offline exposure to finally attract the attention his work deserves.

A Farewell to Paints

In 1921, Ernest Hemingway’s wife Hadley lost her husband’s first novel in a Paris train station. After failing to reproduce the work, Hemingway instead wrote The Sun Also Rises. While discussion of this lost manuscript often centers around the author’s misfortune, the more intriguing question might be: What if the first novel had flopped, and a wounded Hemingway abandoned literature for a career in professional journalism or worse, total obscurity and full-time alcoholism? 

Before Thomasson became an art student at NDSU, he painted “obsessively” until a house fire in 2003 destroyed around 20 larger pieces and 30 smaller ones.

“I was able to save my two cats, a pigeon that I had previously rescued from the ethanol plant and two large paintings,” he said, “but I left the paintings about fifty feet from the house while I drove to the fire station, and by the time I returned, they had caught fire from the radiant heat.”

Despite his habit of buying paints and brushes with the thought of starting up again, he hasn’t painted since.

“Maybe this year will be different,” he writes on his website. But maybe Richard Thomasson the painter would have pushed Richard Thomasson the print maker and photographer out of existence, and if so, some very consoling ideas about losses actually being gains, much like the Zen master’s tale of boy who got a horse for his birthday (how wonderful), broke his leg riding the horse (how terrible),  then avoided going to war because of the broken leg (how wonderful), may be reaffirmed once again.

As the master would say on the objective view of the goodness or badness of any event: “We’ll see.”

2011: A Space Odyssey

Just as film didn’t completely render writing obsolete, and the web networks will never (hopefully!) entirely overtake live interaction, digital artistry cannot replace the manipulation of the physical world in order to create beauty. Of course, hybrids emerge all the time, and Thomasson does use a digital camera, but his work is “analog” in the sense that at first take it doesn’t appear to be photography at all.

“You look at what is going on in his work, and you want to think these images were created digitally,” Thomasson’s professor Kent Kapplinger said, “but it is only the liquid and the lights.”

The process invokes the difference between CG effects in movies and those created with old fashioned, analog techniques like rotoscoping, slit-scan photography, multiple overlapped exposures and even using wire harnesses to mimic flight or weightlessness, a combination of effects which created Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the analog masterpiece that remains a visual wonder 40 plus years after its creation.

“He’s really taking it back to basics,” Kapplinger said. “I’ve been around long enough to remember the psychedelic things that were going on in the 60s and the crossover to digital starting in the 80s.  [Thomasson’s] work really begins to cross some boundaries.”

[Editor’s Note: To view a slideshow of Thomasson’s art go to: http://tiny.cc/HP-ART or scan our QR code with your smartphone.]

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IF YOU GO:

What: Richard Thomasson’s Cosmic JuJu
Where: NDSU Memorial Union Gallery
When: May 11-27 w/ reception on May 12 from 6-7 p.m.