The Pacific Northwest is perhaps the wildest and most awe-inspiring region in the continental United States. Mountains, conifers, lakes, rivers, and ancient redwoods loom along the California coast, and the geography and textures of Wyoming, Montana, California, and Oregon transport us back to North America’s primitive past. It reminds us of the infinite scope, infinite variety, and a commanding beauty of the natural world at that time, which is what Romantic painters and poets had in mind when they thought of the overwhelming majesty and terror of the sublime. How else to explain what one feels when one’s senses are besieged by oceans, green forests, snow-capped peaks and vast blue canvases of sky, all coming together like some eclectic, dense diorama? If there’s one place where nature inspires American artists, it’s the American Northwest
David Rice grew up near Aspen, Colorado, the son of a ski instructor. He grew up loving the natural world. “It makes sense,” Rice said. “I like the idea of us (animals and humans) sharing space together. You can do it in a way that doesn’t interfere with each other.”
Rice has always been fascinated by the presence of wildlife and explained how life in Colorado, Oregon and time spent in Yellowstone National Park gave him the opportunity to capture what he calls the “magic” of seeing bighorn sheep, bobcats, foxes and elk. He’d seen some of North America’s largest animals in and around Yellowstone, and in the rural Colorado town where he grew up, he was used to black bears roaming the neighborhood and napping in trees during the day, like the languid beasts in children’s books. Many of Rice’s paintings embody this peaceful, local coexistence, hinting at a tender and fragile humanity in his depictions of North American wildlife.
Rice’s start-up phase often begins with photography. He would go outdoors with his DSLR camera and photograph any fragment of wilderness he came across, whether it was “barren landscapes” or “weird angles,” which gave him a novel vantage point for observing nature’s contours. He then used these photographic references as early frameworks for his sketches and ultimately paintings. For Rice, observing wildlife is central to his art. “[It’s important]to understand how they move, to see where their joints are.” But getting a glimpse of iconic North American animals like bald eagles, red foxes and mountain lions, which are ingrained in centuries of American mythology and Native American folklore, is more than just a means of achieving anatomical accuracy. “Being able to see (these animals) in real life makes it important, or to look at more than just (for example) a deer: You see that deer, that particular deer. You don’t just put it into the category of deer. That connection is the whole reasoning behind what I do.”
Rice discusses the magic of seeing animals in the wild and the indescribable electricity of eye-to-eye contact with big cats, moose, and brown bears. It’s no exaggeration to say that much of Rice’s work, and perhaps his art’s most important raison d’être, stems from those private, isolated moments, moments when humans and wild animals look into each other’s eyes, acknowledging for a brief moment the maelstrom of curiosity, fear and awe behind their eyes. It’s a very specific, fleeting kind of magic, when the gap between species briefly but quickly closes and you feel like you’re temporarily trapped in the inner life of another creature. This is the magic of the interloper.
After gathering enough reference photos from his own outdoor shoots and wildlife photography from publications like National Geographic, he would put all the images together and “Frankenstein” them in Photoshop.
When he had pieced together a rough approximation that he was satisfied with, he began sketching from the merged reference images. He constructs backgrounds with multiple layers of paint to achieve the layered texture evident in much of his work. He intentionally left the early coats “punched through” to give the wallpaper a tattered, worn-out aesthetic that he favored. Next comes the composition’s animal themes, then “ornaments,” which he said “help to emphasize the charming quality that many of the paintings possess.”
