Artist Fred Richards--Life as a Work of Art

 

1. TELL ME ABOUT YOUR WORK? WHAT OR WHO INFLUENCES YOU AND WHY CREATE WHAT YOU CREATE?

A self-taught artist, I started painting on a regular basis when my Buddhist teacher, Zen priest and artist Richard Kirsten Daiensai, told me to paint something! I create to stay inspirited or spiritually alive, to open up to and express my innermost self rather than become one of the walking dead. Presently, I know little about “the art world” and not much more about the history of art. Painting is, fortunately, for me, still a new adventure. Sometimes it is, I imagine, a bit like a woman giving birth to a child and being amazed she was a significant part of bringing such wonder into the world!

2. YOU WORKED IN OTHER CAREERS. HOW HAS YOUR PREVIOUS WORK LIFE INFLUENCED YOUR ART?

I have lived many lives and have been countless things from lumper on the Boston docks to a merchant seaman, from ditch digger to English teacher to psychotherapist. I’ve experienced a lot of suffering and healing, joy and sorrow, brokenness and transformation. I’ve worked hard and played hard. I paint to honor what my soul knows, striving to make the invisible visible, to express what is beyond words to say.

3. WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON NOW?

I’m working on not seeing my art experience as a career or a job, but keeping it part of my spiritual practice, one of several ways of learning what it is to be human, to be loving and really alive. I yearn to create art that is as wonderful as the art I sometimes paint in my dreams! And I have had a dream in which I create a painting so true to life or reality that someone viewing it was awakened, liberated to be really alive!

4. WHAT DO YOU SEE AS YOUR GREATEST CHALLENGE AS AN ARTIST?

I once said that my greatest challenge as an artist and a human being was to create a self or a life that is a work of art. Since I often am able to paint well without really knowing what I’m doing, I need to not give into the fear that one day I just won’t be able to do what I do. I need to keep trusting that unknown power or inner artist that keeps working through me to do more than I know intellectually I can do. I actually believe that, for me, my being able to paint has a lot to do with my becoming more loving and kind and forgiving and compassionate. I don’t understand this, but if painting wasn’t a part of my becoming, in my view, more human and alive, I don’t believe I’d bother to do it.