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Romanos Rizk in his Provincetown studio. |
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Lily Pond #64, oil by Romanos Rizk, showing at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in Provincetown. |
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Rizk retrospective traces a master’s work in divergent styles
By Reva Blau
Banner Correspondent
Romanos Rizk, who has been painting in Provincetown since 1949, is easily one of Cape Cod’s most renowned and well-respected artists. A much-anticipated retrospective of his work goes on display at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum Friday, May 30, and runs through July 27. The opening reception is 7 to 9 p.m. Friday.
Rizk began with academic study and then moved successively through periods of impressionism, abstraction and realism, almost as if getting into a time machine moving back and forth, palette and brush in hand. In each of his periods, he has intensely perfected his techniques, adapting his brushwork to fit his visual passions. As a result, he has established a reputation not simply as a practitioner but as a virtuoso in genres as different as abstraction and photorealism.
Rather than building up a canvas, Henry Hensche, whom Rizk eventually studied with, taught his students to put paint directly onto the canvas. Color was form already, he taught. Rizk was attracted to the approach because he felt that he was allowed to trust his instincts.
As with several of Hensche’s students, Rizk decided that he could make a living as a portrait painter. During this period, he spent a few years subletting a place in Greenwich Village.
Upon his return to Provincetown, Rizk worked several jobs painting houses and as a cook for Ciro & Sal’s at the West End of town. He eventually quit, saying, “The only reason I don’t sell enough paintings is because I don’t have faith. If I don’t work, the paintings will sell. If I devote myself to painting, the paintings will sell.” He was right.
While studying with Hensche, Rizk began to experiment with abstraction, which was already the vogue. He used the directness with which Hensche applied color to the canvas and took it further, removing the referential object tout court.
Over the course of several years, Rizk discovered a way of pouring a series of acrylic paints onto the canvas. He would walk all four sides of the canvas before the paint dried, tilting the canvas and using a spatula to move the paint. “If you went back to try to change them later,” Rizk explains, “they ended up looking like you hadn’t gotten it right. You had to do it all at once.”
Long before it was the rage, Rizk became interested in Chinese painting and Buddhist philosophy. He even studied calligraphy with a Japanese artist. He painted on rice paper but also extrapolated to make black-and-white acrylic poured paintings.
He went on to do paintings of sublime and Courbet-esque, salacious realism: tables laden with fruit, bottles, yes, but also Chinese dolls, swirling Flamenco dancers, ballerinas in tulle and point shoes with their faces coyly bowed away from the viewer and fleshy nudes, all the more erotic because of the cloths decently covering them.
In the last 10 years, Rizk has been doing paintings that can be seen as a synthesis of his entire career. They are abstractions of the pond, with the shimmering surface of photographs. They can be seen as landscapes, and yet the point of view is almost vertical, as if one is the sky itself and has become an angular ceiling reflecting the wildness within the imagination. The palette couples the deepest, darkest moss with the wildest crimson. These paintings give us a peek at the internal ferocity that lurks behind Rizk’s gentlemanly and affable demeanor.
For the full text of this interview, see the May 29 Provincetown Banner.
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‘Intimate Apparel’ covers up a little too much
Outer Cape Gallery Listings
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May 29th, 2008