Artist 2 Artist
Rodney Dickson
900-K (2005), ten color silkscreen, 14 X 14 in.
Lunarbase Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is hosting D. Dominick Lombardi’s first one-person exhibition since March of 2003. Lunarbase Gallery Director, Yuko Kawasi-Wylie has fostered her own stable of mainly Japanese artists working in a distinctively Japanese cartoon-like way called Characterism, and Lombardi’s work fits very comfortably into this group.
Rodney Dickson: I am very familiar with your black India ink drawings on paper. These color works, they are acrylic on Plexiglas, correct?
D. Dominick Lombardi: Yes. They are reverse painted, acrylic on Plexiglas. It is more difficult to reverse paint, since you are painting from front to back. And with the unmodulated colors I use, you need to have a number of coats so it adds quite a bit of time to the process. This tediousness is best suited for my temperament.
RD: You know, one thinks this way naturally, from the line, or the outline, to the color – so I think it sounds like a natural process.
DDL: Oh absolutely. I like doing the black line first. Many times, in the traditional way of painting, those first lines, the drawing on the canvas if you do a drawing first, gets covered over, and you may never get it back. That can be a problem if the quality of the original lines were better in the drawing then they are in the painted edges.
But getting back to the tediousness of the process. That extra time that it takes to make these works, as compared to the time it would take to paint them in a more traditional, face-on manner does one very important thing for me. It gives me all that extra time, maybe three or four times the amount of time, to look more deeply into the characters I am painting. That is how the overall narrative started. I began to see in the characters, their individual personalities. I began to develop in my mind, little vignettes as the characters would interrelate. I saw them, how they behave, how they would move about, think and respond to certain situations.
You get mesmerized when you are doing something tedious. Your mind breaks free, and you get into this altered state. Then you can pull more easily from your subconscious. That is where all the best ideas are. And that gets into, what I believe, is this big creative continuum concept, whereby we all, as artists, pull out of and feed back into constantly. The creative continuum is something that has been around forever and will always be, and it is not something that is controlled or divided up by any units of time.
I also believe there can be specific lines or feeds from that creative continuum when you shed the distractions, and work with your subconscious. You can unconsciously target someone, or be targeted yourself through that continuum. My source for these works, which I call The Post Apocalyptic Tattoo, is this future being, a tattoo artist that has a similar affinity to low culture. The work is also suggestive of how bodies are being degraded by way of the various pollutants that are a by-product of so-called progress.
In a future time, say 5,000 years from now, we are all completely messed up, vulnerable physically, but stronger mentally. You know, the biology is all screwed up, the intestines and the brains are on the outside. No one has the upper hand because everyone’s problems are so overt. You are never worried if anyone can detect your weaknesses because it’s all right there for everyone to see, and there really isn’t time to worry about it because the physical world is so challenging. This levels the playing field so it actually becomes a better place to live.
Then there is this esthetic that is lowbrow, because people aren’t living long enough to develop refined tastes. The tattoo becomes the last art form one accepts because you never live past that stage. In addition, a sort of comic book, cartoonish inclination is in there too, with an emphasis on black line, and a tendency toward unmodulated color.
RD: Tell me more about the works here.
DDL: Well, we don’t have them all here, but there are the original eighty or so color paintings that are the designs for color tattoos. Then there are the first eight wall mounted sculptures that are the basis for the narrative. I keep seeing their images over and over again: Exotic Dancer, Blue Boy, Potato Eyes, over and over. I assume this future tattoo artist is seeing them the most often, so they became the central characters.
Then there are the one thousand plus, black and white India ink drawings that are the platform for this future world. These are the faces in the crowd that caught the tattoo artist’s eye. Without their 15 minutes of fame, they never get elevated to a color tattoo, but they still are seen as viable designs.
These drawings are also the basis for a new sub series of silkscreens, where I take liberties with these individuals by combining any number of them. These silkscreens, or serigraphs, seem to be helping to put these visions, if you want to call them that, into a different context so you could see a relationship or recognition between the faces and the expressions.
Sometimes these drawings are simple shapes without faces. Other times, they are more detailed. In fact, the further along we go here, the more detailed, and more specific they become. I am also seeing experimentation with styles, and ways of representing these faces which relates to another important point. For about a year now, I’ve been getting different sorts of images – a style of drawing that is more developed in a way. I am thinking that there is another artist competing with the original one – and that either the first artist is seeing these competitors drawings and transmitting them to me, or the second artist found a way into our little give and take.
RD: It is also interesting, when you talk about the actual making of the work, that this is very much a subconscious element. This all ties in with something you said earlier, regarding your concerns with the environment, and how that all ends up as these overwhelming mutated forms.
DDL: Sure. Absolutely. I think we all, on some level anyway, think about the environment. We may choose to ignore our fears, or just try not to think about it. Or we can let it color the way we see the world around us. For me, it comes out in my art. Now, whether or not those interests, or fears actually produced this whole thing, I couldn’t say. I prefer to believe in that creative continuum, and my interest in the future, and what we may be headed for is subconsciously directing me to the one person I could relate to best.
RD: You also talked about the tediousness of your process, especially with the paintings – how it takes all that extra time. There are a lot of artists out there who would find it boring to make paintings that way. At the same time, whenever I was painting those lines in my paintings, it would take weeks and months to do it, and it is boring sometimes. But what I found was, if I did it for half an hour, I would be bored. But if I could set aside eight hours in the day to do it, then it became this spiritual experience.
Sure, it’s boring to paint lines. It’s a simple thing to do. But something else comes into it. I am far from an expert on religion, but I’ve seen in Vietnam, when people do these repetitive things, prayer or chant, or some such thing that they find it to be spiritual or meditative.
DDL: Absolutely. It has to do with your mind and body feeling completely in touch with one thing. Hey, look. If you want to say that this all brings you closer to god, then more power to you. If you want to say it brings your mind and body into perfect harmony, then that’s great. For me, it’s simply about being at peace with myself and my fears. My work straddles that line between the hideous and the beauteous and that is just right for me because it is in balance.
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