Biography

Richard Webb received his BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1972. Since the early sixties, he identified with the visionary works of deChirico, the "Critical-Paranoia" of Dali, and the automatisms of Tanguy, Miro, and Masson. As a lifelong proponent of Dada and Surrealism, Webb's involvement in Painting, Printmaking, Drawing, and Photography as a highly esoteric and enigmatic representation of the Freudian subconscious, as well as, a vehicle for engaging the viewer's experience of the "natural world" in unlikely and often unflattering ways. Whether indulging in abstractions, psycho-narratives, figurative, erotic, or hard hitting social commentary, Webb constantly "pushes the envelope" in both form and content. "No Sacred Cows" best describes his affinity for the confrontational in art and "Ethereal and Sublime" for the less temporally motivated work. To follow is a resume of one man shows and artistic inclusions in exhibitions which have some Surrealist components. Webb normally works on an entire exhibit at once with intermittent submissions to shows of individual pieces around certain themes that appeal to him.

2008—International Invitational, Ouch My Eye Gallery, Seattle, WA, 3 paintings

2005—"Legacy of the Corporeal," The Black Cat Studio/Gallery, Seattle, WA, 25 paintings, print, & drawings

2003—"Inside Surrealism," The Black Cat Studio/Gallery, Toledo, OR- 25 paintings, prints, and drawings

2002—"Coastal Glandscapes," The Black Cat Studio/Gallery, Toledo, OR, 25 paintings, prints & drawings

2000—"In Dreams-The New Surrealism," The Altamira Gallery, Raleigh, NC, 3 drawings

1999—"Vice of Internoggin," The Le Roi Gallery, Seattle, WA, 18 drawings

1995—"Hechas Humo!" jaleria El Mason de las Ranas, Mexico, DF, 45 paintings, prints, drawings, & photographs

1994—"Erogenous Zones,” Galeria Club Mama Rumba, Mexico, DF, 18 photographs

1992—"Condoms-R-Us," The Palace Gallery, Portland, OR, 12 paintings

1989—"Positive/Negative," The Coos Art Museum, Coos Bay, OR, 3 photographs

1989—"The Subject is AIDS," The Nexxus Gallery, Atlanta, GA, 1 painting

1989—" Farewell to Forrest Avenue," The Nexxus Gallery, Atlanta, GA, 1 drawing

1988—"Art Addressing AIDS," Center Gallery, San Francisco State College, 1 painting

1988—"Nuclear Visions," Newport Visual Arts Center, Newport, 0R,1 painting

1988—"Eroticism National," The Alonso/Sullivan Gallery, Seattle, WA, 1 drawing

1987—"Shared Visions." Coos Art Museum, Coos Bay, OR, 3 paintings

What is it about the Surrealist process that permeates and gives meaning to an artist such as Richard Webb's life work? As a painter, printmaker, poet, photographer, and musician, his loyalty to the International Surrealist Movement, as a left wing artist/adversary or as an independent, intensely personal studio artist, has never been questioned.

"To understand the processes of Surrealism, in one’s life," says Richard, "one would have to first separate the internal and personal process from the external application as an empirical manifestation . The thought processes in art span the Right-Left brain abyss from the surgically precise to the purely intuitive. Surrealism's technique is to throw one side at the other until something happens perceptively. One side must claim to be the rational idea and act accordingly and the other side has to prove convincingly that it is 'in charge." The point at which this conflict self destructs, or syntax collapses is the liberating "Point of No Return" resulting for some in an aesthetic "thrill" and in others, artistic indigestion. To me, they are one and the same and , as life ebbs and flows around great ideas large and small, I remain calm, convinced that the objects I create with this powerful knowledge as the underpinning, coupled with a genuine love of humanity, will be both Revolutionary and Divine! I t is the same language with many different voices: Some are loud and unforgiving, the others, quiet, but equally determined. The context alone will determine its root sincerity."

While most artists, fiercely independent, avoid academic and commercial labels, Richard, also fiercely independent, is just the opposite. Whether blatantly political, socially uncomfortable, figurative, non-figurative, erotic, or abstract, Richard pulls no punches. His higher calling is both left and right brain, paintballs and bullets, confrontational and healing. All seeming contradictions until they are experienced with an open mind, and more importantly an open heart. "I am proud to be known from the start of a relationship, good or bad, that I am a Surrealist. If they know what that is, it cuts out a lot of the B.S. They know that they are free to discuss just about anything on any level be it spiritual, material, revolutionary, anarchic, or whatever the\ need to, and that they will have my undivided attention and will not be judged crazy, irrational or heartless, unless, of course, they cross over the line into the world of Right Wing Hogwash at which point they will be intellectually mailed and cast into a sea of hungrily circling Art Sharks," says Richard with a Pirate's "Arrrgh!"'

How on Earth did Richard get this way? He was born in 1946 in Georgia. His father took the family to Raleigh, NC, to study textile engineering at N.C. State on the G.I. Bill. By working hard and moving around the South, his father finally in 1958 got a big break and was hired to set up textile factories in Tehran, Iran for the Shah. Richard's early exposure to Islamic Art and Muslim culture took the form of music, visiting villages outside modern Tehran, and walking on the same stones as did warriors and kings of the Crusades deep into the Great Bazaar where rugs, gold, and silver daggers and centuries old jewels provided the only light.

Returning to the South for his senior year in Union, S.C., with all its racial tensions and bigotry, did not sit well with the larger world view Richard had garnered, not only from his experiences in the Middle East, but also from the fabulous vacation trips going back and forth through Europe, going to cathedrals, museums, galleries, and architectural wonders all over Europe, Richard was introduced to a fabulous assortment of people, cultures, and Western Art.

Upon graduation from High School Richard was accepted into the School of Liberal Arts at East Carolina College in Greenville, N.C. His parents left and went to Nigeria to work. Richard , within a few months, was in a battle of wills with the faculty over what they thought was appropriate subject matter for Freshmen art students. World traveled and full of big ideas, the tightly controlled classical still-life and the local big red tobacco barns were not in the picture for Webb, (no pun intended). He was a Bohemian! The content problem diminished with an off-campus studio in the second year (1964). Richard settled into the serious study of the "Plastic Arts." This included color and design, perspective, Cezanne's composition, engineering, drafting, etc.

The second year also hosted a new kind of activity resulting in a radical shift in artistic interest in both form and content. The Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement had found their newest zealot! His art took on a subversive style and confrontation was the name of the game. His instructors in painting and printmaking were not amused and decided that his work was too subversive for their liberal arts program. With eminent expulsion, rice paddies, and war on the horizon, Richard joined the Navy for a four year stint, keeping detailed sketchbooks of ideas for paintings, prints, and drawings. At a port of call in San Francisco, Richard visited the San Francisco Art Institute and was so impressed with the high level of importance placed on conceptual thinking and a real respect for the unconventional, that he knew this was the place for him to finish his studies. Fortune smiled and Richard was pronounced, after a year at sea on a spy ship, to be unfit for further service due to his visionary appetite and his self-incriminating sketchbooks and diaries. He was a good sailor and was honorably discharged in 1969.

By the time he entered the cloistered halls of SFAI in 1970, he was already focused on the metaphysical world of deChirico, the critical-paranoia of Dali, the visions of Tanguy, and the automatisms of Miro, Klee, and Masson and eager to embrace his Surrealism, Heart and Soul! By 1972, Richard's waterfront studio was overflowing with paintings, prints, and drawings. He graduated a semester early with a BFA in Painting in 1972. The jaws of urban renewal consumed the waterfront studio, so Richard left the Bay Area and relocated down the coast in Santa Cruz, CA, where his new-found love of film making and documentary photography put him in the front lines of the anti-war movement filming strikes and marches of the United Farm Workers Union under Caesar Chavez.

Documenting the struggles of Campasinos and Native Americans (Ohlone) gave Richard a whole new look at injustice and inspired him to use his art talents to a higher end. A tremendous amount of both political and personal art was made from 1972–1976. As the political and technical director of the Radical Art Collective, Richard was the main instructor in the area for screen printing subversive art. Many of his students were radicals with no art training but with a need to express their groups objectives, etc. The problem was that few of them could even draw, so Richard created many classes on color and design in which he switched out Cezanne's landscapes, for example, and replaced them with issue oriented imagery which his students could relate to.

Once he was confronted by an anarchist who had a problem with that technique insisting that revolutionary art shouldn't need any rules. Webb's reply is a key to the importance he, 41 years later, still places on the perfect balance of form and content in any work of art, political or otherwise:

"Without a functional grasp of design fundamentals, the Revolutionist is powerless to express, in a moving and convincing way, not only the fine points of an idea, but more importantly, 'the inherent love of humanity which, in essence, drives the revolutionary process' (Che to the United Nations in 1960). A political work of art that ignores these fundamentals of human perception will only produce reactionary feelings of negativity, uncertainty, and instability—hardly a vessel for change. A viewer, uncomfortable with the visual confrontation will do anything on a reactionary basis to escape the experience. Poor control of design elements will surely provide that escape. The real issue, political or not, being presented will either be conveniently side-stepped or ignored."

As the war finally ended in 1976, Richard would have to start making some serious decisions about his future both as an artist and a single parent. Embracing the established gallery system for a career as an artist was pretty much out of the question. The history and the content of his work, no matter how beautifully done, was just too radical and out of the mainstream. Screen printing, on the other hand, was art related and could produce some financial stability. Webb began a career in commercial screen printing that would take him to the top of his trade in the printing of fine art editions in Mexico.

The next five years would be spent working in screen printing in San Francisco, Hawaii, Oregon, and Guam, finally settling in Coos Bay, Oregon, where there was cheap studio rent, a respectable local art museum, a decent high school for his daughter, and some friends from Guam. Coos Bay was the new home of Richard's Black Cat Studio/Gallery which was started in 1985. It became the subterranean headquarters for the creation and dissemination of Surrealist and DADA thought and action. It was his own little Cafe Voltaire! With parties, workshops, exhibitions, & happenings, etc., he enlivened the small town art scene. Playing music with his Black Dice Blues Band was a fabulous pastime and a good source of income as well. His book 911, Exile on Market St. was written there in 1986.

Webb, exporting his ideas, was in 8 major exhibits in 1988 and 1989. The "Safe Sex" exhibit of eight large paintings called "Condoms-R-Us was completed in 1991 and shown in Portland at The Palace Gallery in 1992, blowing many minds. Gays and Straights howled in comic relief while ideologues of the Right and Left grumbled in disgust at the audacity of the uninfected to find humor in the suffering of others, patently untrue, that was all the critics could say about these ass kicking images.

The words of a critic for one piece of this exhibit, which went to a show at the Nexxus Gallery in Atlanta, were perfect! "A few of the artists vent their frustration with an incurable, debilitating disease by attacking the viewer with anger, subtly revealing their own mean spirited hatred, while decrying it in others. In Richard Webb's 'POP Goes The Weasel' a heterosexual couple (actually Jim and Tami-Faye Baker), their cartoon figures encased in giant condoms, relaxes (actually they were masturbating) against the backdrop of an American flag and a Cross, while Death peers over them about to prick the reservoir tips perched gaily atop their heads!"

“As my first review, it was pretty scathing, even if they did miss the point entirely, but, I didn't care. Just knowing I could get under those hypocrites’ skin with my art really ‘made my day!'” says Webb.

In 1992, he left the Pacific Northwest for Mexico City to work for the Swedish artist Peter Mussfeldt as a technical consultant for his garment design lines. Richard was a published author in his trade and was starting to get consulting contracts and opportunities to travel from his book, articles, and seminars. While working in Mexico City, Richard also worked as an artist painting and print-making . He was making new art of a personal variety and developing his erotic photography. The B.S. of American political media was nowhere to be found.

These efforts culminated into two fantastic exhibitions! The first was in erotic photography at Galeria Mama Rumba in 1995. "Erogenous Zones" was muy caliente! Several pieces were sold ending up in the infamous Kinnesaw Collection. Unfortunately for the Condoms-R-Us exhibit, it was too radical. Pressure from Catholic sources prevented it from being shown. The second show had 45 paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs spanning three floors at Galaria Mason de las Ranas called "Hechas Humo!" or "Up in Smoke!" in which he presented Surrealism with an apolitical view point concentrating on visionary, metaphysical, and enigmatic imagery defying traditional printmaking techniques through the use of multimedia and other disciplines. Says Richard about it, "The success of this show was due to the subject matter having the most recognizable tenets of Surrealism in varying degrees of abstraction , proximity, overall voyeurism into the world of dreams, parallel realities, and finally, the non-factual truth of Veristicism where Truth stands alone as the enigmatic 'Voice of Reason'."

Many pieces were sold from this exhibit. Soon, however, with his PEER contract up, the peso collapsing, and his wife in school in the U.S., he decided to make his way back Stateside. This time to Puget Sound's beautiful Victorian seaport: Port Townsend, Washington. Settling down in an old sail-maker’s loft, Richard started in on a new exposition. It would take a year to complete the eighteen "Attack Surrealism" multimedia drawings entitled "Voice of Internoggin." With no venues in charming Port Townsend to show this type or quantity of work, Richard moved the studio to Port Orchard, which was closer to Seattle.

The Vice of Internoggin was finally shown at the LeRoi Gallery in Seattle in 1999, being denounced "Scandalous" by some, and "Divine!" by others.

A few words by Dr. Richard Miller, an accomplished author and scholar from Pacific Grove, CA, with eight major books in print commented on this exhibit:

"The Vice of Internoggin, with its ubiquitous background blue, with its sharp juxtaposition of absurdities, with its smutless smut, with its pink and crimson everywhere although no blood wells from its cleanly dismembered robo-maidens, fragmented icons of classical beauty that they are: Vice of Internoggin, with its pure pallet and painterly control, composes in all a cold emotionless projection of what is to come. Vice of Internoggin’s eighteen multimedia pictures are fresh leaves budding out on Attack Surrealism's tree of life as, fertilized by chaos and calamity, it grows up into what Richard Webb sees as the smoke and flames off our fiery cold future."

The next five years (2003–2008) saw work being done in an art colony in Toledo, Oregon, The Fremont area of Seattle, and The Duwahmish Waterfront of West Seattle as the Black Cat Studio. Painting, printmaking, building printing equipment, commercial screen printing, and workshops kept Richard more than busy. In January of 2009 he was invited to show three new paintings at The "Ouch My Eye" Gallery in Seattle. This was a new "wildcat" gallery downtown which specialized in contemporary ideas presented in daunting ways. Richard's three large paintings of Oracles dematerializing the Statue of Liberty on 9/11 and trivializing the event went over great with the younger hi-tech, pop surrealist crowd.

In 2008, Richard left Seattle moving back to Port Orchard to a country house with two painting studios, a large print shop, and a music studio. When asked how the concept he refers to as a "pure" aesthetic reconciles with subject matter that is inherently predatory on the viewer such as in Vice of Internoggin, where great strides are made to upset the viewer at their core level, Richard explains: "It is not the job of Surrealism to water down confrontation for the sake o f a ‘Pure Aesthetic,’ which is another name for ‘untouchable,’ which is to imply a finite set of responses. This is not, and never has been, a goal of Surrealism. The ‘goal’ of Surrealism is to achieve aesthetic continuity over the act itself, the reinforcement of Desire as its 'First Cause,’ and an amoral participation in the absurd.”

Richard's commitment to the ideals and methods of both historical and contemporary Surrealism is steadfast. His constant "No Sacred Cow" mantra coupled with its ultimate contradiction in the search for that "Pure Aesthetic" will never succumb to the spiritless dogma of the Status Quo in art or anything else.