Richard Martin Ash
Wichita Falls Museum of Art
- Peter S. Briggs -
Richard Ash, Homeland Security, 2004–05; screenprint; 10 x 22 inches; courtesy the artist
Numbers count: 240 plus works of art, 40 years, 1 person. Four decades of an artist’s work entails a Cadillac commitment from museum, artist and viewer. If successful, it can be a luxury ride; if unsuccessful, a gas hog. Curator Danny Bills and artist Richard Ash embedded six galleries, a hallway and foyer with a roughly chronological survey of Ash’s prints, documentary photographs of artist and his associates and printing plates and studio props. In one gallery, props on a rotating sculpture stand cast morphing shadows, recalling the source for specific images. Ash’s printmaking techniques range widely over time: lithography, monoprint, relief, screenprint, intaglio and collograph.
Teaching at Midwestern State University since 1968 considerably modified the structure of Ash’s studio time and work habits. Fortunately, the prints in this exhibition do not exude the dogged conservatism that afflicts many artist-academics. Ash, in contrast, reinvents his printmaking tactics every three or four years, harboring a self-imposed rhythm of revolving subject matter and techniques. Sometimes Ash’s transitions turn sharply. When he strikes anew, the artist intensively explores nuanced avenues and modalities of variables, creating clusters of affinal images. His generative labors manifest an energy that is a bit unnerving, giving pause to reconsider one’s own creative commitments.
Ash’s novel investigations tend to echo past explorations. The mid-seventies series of earthy lithographs, Documents, for example, reforms itself as mid-eighties blazes of serial imagery in Manuscripto, Sombras de Hablo, La Corespondencia and other densely stratified screenprints derived from Spanish Colonial documents. His commitment to expressive color never wavers, and a gestural enthusiasm consumes much of his black and white work (e.g., Snare, Spring, Tide and Untitled). Ink lies on paper as if printed yesterday, constructing palimpsests of images and glosses.
Seductive color slowly yields to subject matter, unearthing both the artist’s humanism and humor. His dexterity in this “democratic” medium memorializes ordinary things, found objects, debris and everyday cast-offs: a Spuds MacKenzie paper mask, over-loved dolls, worn boots, animal skulls and archaic lawn sprinklers. The spate of organized paranoia following 9/11 ricochets through Ash’s recent work, including Homeland Security and Oscar’s Level Orange, while jigsaw images summon constraint, conquest and involuntary destiny (e.g., Las Cartas, Cordage, Civil Liberty, Shackles and Bondage). He explores unspoken existential quandaries—silhouettes of human heads crowded with map and newspaper fragments, Buñuelian eyeballs and targets, intaglios of a tortured, fragmentary heart that broods, it seems, about some personal predicament.
Ash is a chronic image-maker committed to transferring ink or paint from matrix to paper. He has practiced and invented numerous ways to do this, from hallowed traditions to iconoclastic methods that include reduction screenprinting and expert manipulation of billowing sheets of plastic. Spinning and whirling imagery floods sheets of paper with a staccato cadence of shapes, color sensibilities and emotional temperaments. The result is not just a smooth ride but a luxury cruise.
Peter S. Briggs is an art historian and curator living in Lubbock.