Rick Stich

ARTICLES & ARCHIVES

California Viewpoints
Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Rick Stich’s preoccupation with nature stretches back to the months in 1977 When Stich, his wife and infant daughter lived in a tepee in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu. Out of necessity Stich taught himself how to extract pigments from soil, and with his home-made medium did a series of small paintings of primordial natural shapes - funnels, waterspouts, spirals. This work was the beginning of the slowly evolving body of pictures that has occupied him since. It was here that the two central components of his craft – color and drawing – developed from Stich' s experience, literally next to the earth. His turn to the landscape and, by inference, to symbols of nature was thus a wholly empirical one, heightened by survival instinct. They were striking paintings both for their obvious lucidity and for their ambition, which seemed earnest and much larger than their small scale would normally accommodate. As a group, they attempted to convey the iconic power of natural forms without recourse to their depiction. In this, they recalled early twentieth century abstractions, especially Georgia O'Keeffe's and Arthur Dove's paintings. At that moment, Stich appeared heir to an aesthetic that insists on finding an essence. He did it well and unwittingly, as Stich's familiarity with the history of painting was limited to the art he had seen growing up in Southern California. His affinity with the likes of O'Keeffe and Dove is that, like them, he assumes it is every artist's prerogative to reinvent the wheel. No image or technique was too simple for him to try and he invested everything he did with a distinctive seriousness. In these early abstractions his impulse was to return both materially and visually to the basics of art-making. Stich adopted egg tempera for the larger and more colorful paintings that followed the stark iconic work. He could continue controlling the tonal value of his paint with some guarantee of its physical stability. Tempera, which obliges mixing pigment with small quantities of egg yolk, suited both his deliberating artistic temperament and his penchant for a chaste surface. Not one to exploit the inherent lushness of paint as material in his work, there is a constant dry, satin smooth surface to his work, even in the more recent oil paintings. It is symptomatic of Stich's earnestness that his paintings remove themselves from the realm of physical object in favor of an immaterial translucence. Light is central to their success, and he skillfully illuminates them from within. With few exceptions, his is a sunny, light-filled universe - one that closely parallels his own affirmative frame of mind.

By the late 1970's the abstract symbols Stich first employed gave way to larger and more complicated pictures, often composed as diptychs or triptychs. In this work hand-fashioned geometry is combined with more overtly organic forms - emblematic Rowers or a schematized turtle, for example. Stich's fusion of the intellect, as the geometry could be seen to represent, and the sensate, as symbolized by the flora and fauna, is largely compositional. His refined palette unites otherwise disparate elements. Nevertheless, his underlying conviction of the interdependency of all living things is evident. The drawing in the best of his work, Motion or Through an Open Screen (both 1980), for example, establishes a symbiosis of spirit from one panel to the next that enriches the composite beyond the complementary relationships Stich' s sophisticated color could alone affect.

His fundamental urge to demonstrate the interconnection of all beauty prompted Stich's only excursion into environmental art. In 1981, working from Handel's Water Music, he decorated the high white oblong showroom of Ruth Schaffner's gallery in Santa Barbara with large blue and white paintings derived from musical symbols painted directly on the wall. A small fountain and a recording of Handel's music provided auditory counterparts in this sensory-enveloping chamber. Stich and his family moved to Santa Barbara in 1979. After first commuting to a studio in Carpinteria, he found studio space on Victoria Street and shortly thereafter discovered the nearby Alice Keck Park Memorial Garden. He began drawing there daily. The paintings featured here are all from these outdoor motifs.

The four-acre Park Memorial Garden is on the site of an old hotel and was conceived around the mature trees already there. A small stream bisects the rectangular plot, leading to a pond. The area has been landscaped to provide a series of relaxing locales and a wide variety of vegetation within its relatively small confines. Aside from a suite of drawings and related paintings done at a small dahlia farm on Toro Canyon Road, the Park Memorial Garden has inspired almost everything Stich has made over the past five years. His plein air drawings are the starting point for larger studies, usually done on paper, which in turn lead to the paintings. The garden has become the microscopic core of Stich's considerable visual intelligence. True to form, his work begins in direct observations, but its gradual transformation from notation to final form admits for much abstraction and elaboration. The particular expands to the generic. The human figure sometimes populates Stich's work Though based on people he knows - the dahlia farmer or park workers - they assume generalized characteristics in his paintings. The human presence is integrated and submerged in his charged idylls. But the park, its keepers and ,isitors, are not at the bottom of Stich's subject. He paints to posit and reaffirm the vitality of life itself, the sunny perfection of one spot on upper State Street available to anyone willing to experience it, any day, any place. His subject is the wonder of vision itself. So it is that Stich's work rarely conforms to mere depiction. While replicating what he sees (as opposed to knows), he has no qualms substituting beauty for accuracy. Painting after painting is filled with his peculiarly candid poetry. The narrative in his paintings remains implied, so that they seem to be visual parables rather than portraits.

Certain forms assume wide metaphoric powers in Stich's work. For instance, the koi fish that so often animates it are the larger carp Stich knows by sight in the Park Memorial Garden pond. Each has its own personality and all contribute to the composite fish he employs. The pond itself has become central to much of what Stich does. Water's ability simultaneously to sustain and reflect life makes it his favored motif. Stich sees the pond as mirror and host to two interconnected life chains. The fish offer him motions unavailable in humans, just as he ascribes anthropomorphic awareness to the fish. The pond also takes on a larger significance, its curved shoreline typically forming Stich's horizon or frame to his vision. In certain new works a little backwater channel around the pond’s small island is transformed into a fan shape. Alternately, the p:ind itself is transformed in such paintings as Overhanging Tree Screen (1986) into a folding screen. Reminiscent of the earlier multi-paneled paintings, the screen offers Stich a device to show space expanding and contracting across time. This implied motion suggests both the scanning motion of the eye and the sensation of visual memory. Similarly, the fan conducts vision in sweeping glances across the surface. Simultaneously a linear abstraction and decorative accoutrement of civilization, the fans are especially apt for Stich - ideogrammatically fluid and formally interchangeable with many elements of the landscape.

The figures in Stich's paintings do mundane things, but with evident satisfaction. They are well-integrated into the world around them: in the most successful paintings there is a sense of their interchangeability with other animate and even inanimate things. At least, this is how I read a painting like Gazebo Viewers (1986). In it, a woman, her back turned to us, leans at the rail of the gazebo – presumably looking out at the pond. Again, though focussed in general, it is a generalized female figure. The treillage of the gazebo is painstakingly rendered, too, so that human presence and architecture are allied. The sensation of the former in face of a beautiful park scene and the given order of the latter play off one another, since it is precisely at the rectangular openings, the "windows" of the gazebo, that the landscape becomes discernible and, as always with Stich, it is a glorious melange of color and motion. His high-pitched awe before nature becomes infectious. Here, as in so many other paintings, we are prompted to really look, and then infinitely more difficult to believe what we have seen and felt. The power of Stich' s work is in its ability to help us suspend disbelief.

Richard Armstrong