Why I Keep Experimenting With Art

There are artists who find a medium, develop a process, and spend years refining it. I’ve never really worked that way.

I tend to get interested in something, start messing around with it, and see what happens. Sometimes that means trying a new painting technique. Sometimes it means working with a material that was never intended to be used for art. Other times, an experiment starts with no real plan beyond wanting to figure out what something can do.

That uncertainty is one of the things I enjoy most about making art.

I Like Figuring Things Out

A big part of making art for me is problem solving.

When I start working with a new material, I want to understand it. How does it move? What happens when it dries? Can I build with it? Can I paint over it? What happens when I combine it with something else?

You can read about a process or watch someone else do it, but there comes a point when I just need to get my hands on the material and start working with it.

That's usually when the interesting things begin to happen.

I don't necessarily need to know what the finished piece is going to look like before I start. Sometimes I have a pretty clear idea. Other times, I have a material, a color, a texture, or a rough direction and build from there.

The work starts answering some of the questions for me.

Using Things the "Wrong" Way

I've always been interested in materials beyond traditional art supplies.

One of the best examples is insulating foam sealant. I've been working with it for more than 15 years, even though it obviously wasn't created for artists.

Originally, I was using foam to build landscape dioramas and sculptures. It gave me a way to create forms and surfaces that would have been difficult to make otherwise.

The more I worked with it, the more I learned about what it could do.

Eventually, I started thinking about it differently. Instead of using it only to construct three-dimensional objects, I began incorporating it into paintings as a way to create texture and physical depth.

Suddenly, something I had learned while making one kind of art became useful for something completely different.

That's why I don't like putting too many restrictions on what qualifies as an art material. If something produces an interesting result, I'm interested in seeing what I can do with it.

One Experiment Leads to Another

That's also why my work can look pretty different from one collection to the next.

I paint landscapes. I make abstract work. I've created sculptures and mixed-media pieces. I make Gelli prints. I've explored political imagery and graphic compositions.

To me, these things aren't as disconnected as they might initially appear.

Something I discover while printmaking can change the way I think about layering paint. Building sculpture makes me think differently about surface and dimension. Photographing landscapes makes me pay closer attention to color and light. Working abstractly gives me an opportunity to forget about representing something recognizable and concentrate entirely on composition, texture, shape, and movement.

I'm constantly taking little pieces of information from one process and carrying them into another.

Sometimes I don't even realize I'm doing it until later.

Not Everything Works

Experimenting also means making things that aren't particularly good.

That's part of it.

Sometimes an idea that sounds great doesn't work once I actually try it. A material behaves differently than I expected. A composition goes in the wrong direction. I add something to a piece and immediately wish I hadn't.

But even those experiments usually teach me something.

Knowing what doesn't work is still useful information. And every once in a while, a mistake creates something far more interesting than what I originally intended.

Those moments are difficult to plan for.

You have to make enough things—and be willing to mess some of them up—to find them.

Gelli Printing and Giving Up Some Control

Gelli printing is a good example of why I enjoy processes that have some unpredictability built into them.

You can make choices about your colors, textures, shapes, and how you build your layers, but you don't completely know what you've made until you pull the print.

Then you see it.

Sometimes it's close to what you imagined. Sometimes a layer disappears. Something unexpected transfers. A texture becomes much more prominent than you thought it would. Colors interact differently once they're on the paper.

You react to that result and decide what to do next.

That back-and-forth between making decisions and responding to the unexpected is something I find really interesting.

Nature Is Another Kind of Experiment

My landscape work starts from a very different place, but I think the curiosity behind it is similar.

I take photographs while I'm walking in nature and use those photographs as references for paintings. I'm drawn to the way the same place can look completely different depending on the time of day, weather, season, or quality of the light.

Painting a landscape becomes another kind of investigation.

I'm trying to understand what made me stop and photograph that particular place. Maybe it was the light. Maybe it was a color relationship. Maybe it was something about the atmosphere.

I'm not interested only in reproducing the photograph. I'm trying to find whatever it was that made the moment interesting in the first place.

I Don't Know What I'll Be Making Next

And I like that.

I don't want to reach a point where I've figured out the exact process that works and simply repeat it.

There are too many materials I haven't tried, techniques I don't understand yet, and ideas that haven't occurred to me.

Some experiments will become finished pieces. Others might turn into an entire series. Some will probably sit around the studio for years before I suddenly realize what I can do with them.

And plenty won't go anywhere at all.

That's the nature of experimenting.

For me, being an artist isn't just about producing finished artwork. It's about staying curious enough to keep discovering new ways to make it.

— Dave Ruckle