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Photo Melora B. North
Rick Fleury, now exhibiting at the Addison Gallery in Orleans. |
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“Cloudlines” by Rick Fleury. |
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Fleury finds completeness in simplicity
By Melora B. North
Banner Staff
Wellfleet resident and artist Rick Fleury didn’t take up painting until 1997 when he decided to take time off from his career in advertising.
“I wanted to take a break, so I rented a place at Jack’s Wharf in Provincetown. I wanted to be in an artists’ community,” he says. “I bought some watercolors and painted what I saw at the wharf, little images of little slices of life … a forgotten coffee cup sitting on the railing, flowers growing on the vine … slices of beauty just left behind. It was fun, a lark”— a lark that has paid off in spades.
“People saw my work and started buying it,” he explains, still surprised. “I was painting for myself and the paintings were selling. Someone saw my work and gave me a show in Boston. It sold out. ‘Wow,’ I thought, ‘maybe I should give this a shot.’” The rest is history, as they say. Ten years later he is now a featured artist at the Addison Gallery, 43 South Orleans Road in Orleans, where in just the last four months he has sold 41 paintings.
Fleury’s work will be on display at Addison during an open house from 2 to 6 p.m. this Saturday.
Working now in oils on canvas with a recent diversion to oil on copper, the artist paints miniatures as well as large works, one of which is now in the permanent collection at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, where he also teaches classes. A triptych, the piece is titled “Faith, Hope and Happiness.”
“It’s 15 feet long, the largest piece I’ve ever done, and even though it’s three years old I think it’s as fresh as if I painted it last week.”
Locally Fleury leads classes during the summer at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. With a degree in journalism, the artist is self-taught.
“I’m actually glad I never studied. What I do is a result of my own exploration. I never learned what should or should not be done,” he says. “I learned my own song from a natural evolution that taught me it all comes from within.” And this theory is what he imparts to his students — simply put, follow your gut to create, he tells them.
That in mind, his current trend is to render works that are bare-bones minimalist at best. “I’ve taken my art and pushed it as far as I can with minimalism,” he says. “You learn to get a lot from the palette using just a few colors. I pump and push and pull my colors,” the end result being a gentle rainbow of images that melt into one another, creating a work that draws the viewer into the painting with hypnotic magnetism.
Using sparse brush strokes and uncluttered subject matter, Fleury is perhaps best known for his sea and landscapes that explore the nature of our environment, not the nature of man. “I avoid man. Usually my works have no sign of man,” he says. “I try to go back to the purity of the landscape, try to see the simplicity. I’m not attracted to buildings, boats or fences.” In fact, in one painting he is showing at the Addison Gallery, “Homage to Hopper,” there is just a vague allusion to a road in the foreground. “That is the closest to man I have come in years,” he says. “I take out the buildings to capture the essence of the purity of what was.”
Now enjoying painting on copper as well as canvas, Fleury explains it is an old medium. “The Dutch painted on copper hundreds of years ago and the works are still around. They did small iconic paintings because copper used to be very precious, like gold,” he says. “The works were spiritual in nature because the church had the money.” Today, however, the tables have turned and copper is very inexpensive and a delight for this artist to work on. “Copper is a beautiful surface to paint on. It’s sort of a living canvas,” he says — a canvas he is having great fun with. “I think I’m really learning to get the potentials of copper out of the medium. I use luminosity to incorporate as copper,” he says. “It’s an interesting surface. I feel like I’m doing everything on copper that I can do on canvas. I let the copper become a part of the palette.”
Using the properties of copper to full advantage, Fleury lets little snippets of the metal shine through the heavy applications of oil that are sometimes textured but most often smooth like silk. The tiny illusions of a shining snippet add a mystique to the work that intrigues and engages the viewer with just a hint of reflection here and there to represent an errant pebble or perhaps a star drop of sun on the tip of a crashing wave. Over time the patina of the copper may change, but such is the nature of nature, a continuous evolution that this artist strives to portray unfettered by man, untouched by progress.
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Vannetter jazzes up the weekend
Outer Cape Gallery Listings
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Dec 13th, 2007