Today we’d like to introduce you to Rives Granade.
Hi Rives, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
During the spring of 1999, I had a seminal experience as a college student in Virginia that set me on the course of living a creative life. A year later, while contemplating a sculpture by Joseph Beuys in the Centre Pompidou, I had the notion that art might be the way. Years of learning, searching, and discovering took me from Texas to San Francisco, teaching gigs in China to fellowships and residencies in Europe, until 13 years ago, I landed in Los Angeles where I’ve been ever since. As far as art is concerned, I’ve been drawing and painting since I was a kid. My parents were very encouraging of it and got me private art lessons. Strangely, I took a break from it in high school but then picked art back up in college and have been obsessed ever since. The older you get, the more you understand what it is that you’re trying to do. For me the most important thing is freedom.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
No road is ever completely smooth, and the idea of making art as a steady progression professionally and economically is a false one for most everyone. Making art is a lifestyle decision. It means spending long hours alone with yourself and your work. It means doing whatever you have to do to keep making things. For me, this has always involved side jobs. I have taught art at all levels including to very young kids. I’ve had graphic design jobs, done post-production for photography, worked in design stores, sold antique furniture and lighting, built crates, and done gallery and museum preparatory work to keep my art addiction going. As for art sales – you have good years and bad. Selling art is like riding a sea of waves. You have to save up for the down times, although I’ve found the older I get the more steady, it is.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My work has always been about questioning the validity of “truth”. It has taken a lot of different forms over the years but a steady theme for me has been to play around with tropes surrounding the creation language and meaning. A turning point for my art came at the beginning of the pandemic when I severed a tendon in my left hand while camping. I happen to be left-handed. The surgery and recovery left me with the inability to use my hand for eight months.
During this time I began drawing and painting with my right hand. It was the right-handed drawing that really caught my attention as something sort of directly tapped into a part of my brain that I had been seeking to express; a more primitive side. Part of my left-handed therapy involved holding and learning to draw with pencils again, and I decided to take these ambidextrous drawings that I’d been doing from paper directly onto larger canvases. So my work over the last three years or so has been more concerned with drawing and what it means to draw. I’m also interested in images that are unstable – images that morph that your eyes can never quite get a fix on. My paintings are like hallucinations made up of layers upon layers of drawings and erasings. I’m most proud of the fact that I have been able to keep making art steadily for the last 15 years. Some of it’s good, some bad, but constantly pushing is all I hope to keep doing.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
A lot of people in the art world want to blame luck on their success or lack thereof (mostly lack of success). Of all of the professions, it is true that art is perhaps subject more to the whims of the culture, politics, and tastes of collectors and curators than most others. Although the same certainly holds true for film, literature, and music as well. The problem is that it’s a dead end to start blaming luck. I have the belief that if the work is good, it will get it’s due at some point. Truly good work should rise to the top. So all you have to do is just make great work. Right? That being said all you can really do is choose to work with good people, and I have been lucky to do that thus far and hope to continue as such…
Contact Info:
- Website: www.rivesgranade.com www.ochigallery.com
- Instagram: @hand_granade
Image Credits
Portraits – Jim Krantz all other pics – Ruben Diaz
