Member Work/Life: Brian Rideout
The realist painter Brian Rideout has a documentarian’s eye. In his much-celebrated American Collection series, for example, he transforms photographs from bygone design books of staged interiors into oil paintings, as if preserving midcentury style in amber. The work is meditative and a little uncanny; I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that a chic, vacant room is, or will be, haunted. By contrast, Rideout’s Toronto studio is a castle of clutter. Heaping stacks of paper sit next to sunglasses next to Tums next to a virtuosic painting of patinated dress shoes from a storied French brand (a recent commercial commission.) All to say: Rideout doesn’t need order to create work of ethereal precision and beauty.
How long have you been in this space?
⎯⎯⎯ I've been in this space just for a couple of months. Just moved into this new studio, and I've honestly been, like, bumping around from studio to studio as they all eventually get closed and torn down and turned into condos. So it's been an interesting few years, and I actually just came from a six-month residency at East Room, where I was making paintings for East Room at East Room.
How was that residency?
⎯⎯⎯ It was really cool. It was great because we could get the project going while the building was still in construction. There was a huge office that no one was in when we got going. It's this massive, massive office. I don't know if you have seen the paintings, but they're huge paintings. So it was amazing to get to work in there. Two of the paintings were too big to even get in the building, and we ended up having to cut the stretchers in half and fold them and then bring them into the building and reconstruct them inside. And then they almost didn't fit because I made everything on the third floor, and they live on the second floor. So they almost didn't fit going down the stairs again.
Thank God they did, or else that six months would have been for nothing.
⎯⎯⎯ The other thing I will say is, because the building was under construction from April to August, there was no air conditioning and it was on the third floor and there's no windows you can open. I swear to God, it was like the hottest room, space, whatever you want to call it, I've ever been in. The way the building is set up, there's AC just for the third floor and then there's AC for the rest of the building. The rest of the building was always working, so I would just walk through these cold, cold, cold offices and go up to my sweat box studio where honestly, some days I could only work for like 45 minutes and I would be drenched in sweat. And then I think they fixed the air conditioner like a week before I was done with everything. It was crazy.
I would lose my mind.
⎯⎯⎯ A lot of days I could only work for like an hour a day. Luckily, I wasn't on a timeline or anything, so I could, like, go in and fuck around for an hour and call it a day, which is nice.
People love to hear about the artist’s process. What’s your day-to-day like?
⎯⎯⎯ I’m figuring out the Cloud now. I was always the person who was like, I'm not even gonna buy into it, I'll just have hard drives. And then I'm like, fuck, I'm gonna break one, and then my whole system is gonna go down. It's funny, relating it back to the artistic process. I think about systems a lot, and I think something that's not talked about that I actually find really interesting is what the job is of being an artist—all the things that are included, especially when things are going—like, I don't have a staff or anything doing the invoices. You're really doing every single thing: you clean, and you paint, and you do the invoices; you manage your whole everything. I actually think figuring that part out is really interesting. The technical or practical work is equally as fulfilling and interesting to me as the conceptual part.
I think there's a lot of stuff that doesn't get talked about being a painter. Like, being a realist painter and painting really complicated imagery, you have to understand the systems of how the paint’s gonna work, how the image works, and how you're actually gonna work through it in an efficient way. Or else you're just gonna be coming up against roadblocks all the time. I know I can just work on that for the rest of my life. I'm never gonna come to a finished solution, but it's always this process of working through those systems.
What are some of those efficiencies, or some of those human systems that you can think of?
⎯⎯⎯ This is kind of how I explain these interior paintings a lot of the time. I paint them as if I'm building the house. So you go from the outermost structures, and then you paint the walls, and then you paint what's on the walls. You have to organize the image in a way so that things actually stack in front of each other, and create that pictorial distance that you want.
Is there some connection there that draws you to the subject of your paintings?
⎯⎯⎯ The main thesis of these paintings is that they are paintings of private collections. So it's art that is only accessible through these images. I'm interested in this one period of collecting, which was before the market took off: AbEx, minimalism, the 50s to the 70s, when collecting was just kind of starting to come into vogue. These places don't exist anymore, these collections probably don't exist anymore. It's a staged photo, but it's a staged photo that really never existed after the photo was taken. I'm extending or slowing down that history of this moment that didn’t exist.
It's like applying that same system to capture a different creative process, someone else’s painting, interior design.
⎯⎯⎯ You’re painting it as if you're building it. So you've got the architect, you've got the interior designer—I love this stuff—and then you have the florist. All the decisions that have gone into ending up here are almost infinite. I think a lot about appropriation because that is my practice; everything I do comes from outside of me, comes from the world as a fully formed thing. There's somebody who designed these cushions, there's somebody who designed this couch, there's somebody who designed the chair in the back. It’s layers of appropriation on top of each other, which is just what life is.
People talk about the frame of the photo, and how that ends up being the be all, end all of this pure thing. That is copyright. Somebody else made everything, and all we're doing is kind of putting a frame around it.
I think what distinguishes you as an artist is the choices you make in representing a room or appropriating an image through your medium.
⎯⎯⎯ That's another part of the process where it's like, these pieces aren't just for me. You can look at lots of books that have lots of images like these with famous or important art collections in them, but I need the image to function as a painting before I've done anything to it. That is my purely internal process of knowing paintings, knowing design, knowing composition. I know just from looking at these images what's going to work and what's not.
I also think just looking through books of interior design, for me, feels the exact same as going to a museum. One is just a big room with a bunch of pictures in it, and one's a book. And for me, I don't need the hierarchy of image importance. I think images are important.
How did the collaboration with Bazaar France come about?
⎯⎯⎯ Random email. Literally, an out-of-the-blue email.
The art director?
⎯⎯⎯ It was an agency that was managing whatever part of this process was for the magazine. I have been doing full-page illustrations for their short story segments in every issue. They’re absolutely beautiful. I've been doing a lot more collaborating with people recently, and it's been interesting. It’s almost like a confidence thing. People pitch me ideas, and I think that their ideas suck, so I'm like, ‘I have a better idea, so just listen to me.’ Then I just can be an airhead and don't realize that I'm talking to the art director of an important magazine and telling him that I don't think that his idea is very good and that he should go with my idea, then winning it.
Do you enjoy collaborating?
⎯⎯⎯ I will do anything for Derreck, because it's been a great working relationship at East Room. I don't like being told what to do, and I will always butt up against it. But if someone brings me an idea and I tell them what I can do with it, and they either like it or they don't, and we move ahead or we don't.
It just gets back to this idea of hierarchy. Like, we don't say that certain magazine publishers are artists, and we don't elevate them to that same level. I just think it's silly, especially now when you think about art and historically important paintings. That’s probably never going to exist again, because there’s just not enough cultural relativity for a painting to be really important. But movies are really important. Those will definitely be like the artworks that survive from this time.
I feel like art is the last creative industry that’s still home to psychos. Like, it’s extremely commercial, but there will always be true freaks. What’s your place in the art world?
⎯⎯⎯ I do love being a part of the art world. I still think that we're the last wild children. It's fun to be a part of. I love art. I love artists. I like bad art. I like gossiping. Art, I think, is the one field where literally no one will ever tell you what to do next. Unless you have a personal mentor, there's no one to tell you what is a good move or a bad move, or do this or do that.
Let me say this about the market. I find myself functioning in a way that is maybe slightly different from my peers, by taking on these illustration jobs and stuff. So I kind of have a foot in both worlds, doing some commercial work and then I've got my gallery in Toronto, and I've shown internationally, and that's been great. I've gotten to travel. I'm conscious of the audience. It's great that people respond really well to these paintings, because this series has given me my career.
I can be a bit of a chaotic person. I've been lucky, and I've been doing this for going on 10 years and have been able to maintain my life through my practice, and I cannot imagine having to listen to anyone. I can barely follow my own rules.
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