When looking at the paintings and illustrations of California-based artist Richard Colman, it’s clear that his electric-hued, intricately detailed images are influenced by everything from Byzantine-era iconography to geometric abstractions. Less obvious, however, is that the Washington, DC native started out as a graffiti artist.
“Graffiti had nothing to do with what I would be doing when I was older,” Colman says. “That stuff was just very in the moment.” Yet even though his current aesthetic hardly shows a trace of his graffiti past, those early experiences have stayed with him throughout his career and have informed his identity in the fine-art realm.
As a teenager growing up in the suburbs of DC, he was cognizant of the city’s role as the nation’s political pulse but also of its less publicized underbelly. Colman was completely drawn to the capital’s grittier side, so when his peers introduced him to graffiti art when he was 13 years old, it wasn’t long before Colman would start sneaking into the city with a couple of spray cans in tow.
“I grew up doing graffiti and that sort of stuff,” he says, “so naturally, you’re sort of drawn to the seedier sides of the city, and you’re kind of lurking around in the middle of the night. It was really just a fun way to cause trouble when you’re a kid.”
By the time Colman was ready to attend Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1998, he was ready to leave tagging back in DC. Aside from a side gig creating murals for Coca Cola while he was in college, Colman essentially had put his graffiti work on the backburner in his early 20s.
“Even now, I’ll do it occasionally if I meet up with friends, but I pretty much left it behind when I went to art school,” he says. “I saw it as two different things, because I had been doing [graffiti] for so long. The influence was there, but I think that I spent a lot of time to find other ways. I wasn’t there to keep doing what I was doing before.”
Being in a new city, Colman wanted to embrace the new techniques that he was learning in school and keep an open mind to how other art genres could influence his work. He became fascinated by the detailed portraiture that was prevalent in Renaissance paintings as well as the simple, two-dimensional quality of Byzantine-era work. Colman took this experience as an opportunity to start learning about as many artistic mediums as possible.
“While I was in school and even before that,” he says, “I’ve always found that kind of stuff very interesting, just through very simple gesture and the direction in which someone is looking and all of those subtle details.”
During this time, Colman also found inspiration among his fellow students. “It’s pretty rare when you can be in an atmosphere where everyone is making things and you could see what fellow classmates and friends were doing,” he says. “I would find that exciting, happening right in front of you. I was introduced into way more things that way than from the classes, because when they present it to you, it is very impersonal. When people are making things…you can actually be involved in that.”
Although Colman’s previous graffiti work may not have had a direct influence on the direction that his art was taking, he still kept ties with the friends that he made within the graffiti scene. It was this group that really taught Colman how to start considering the professional side of the art industry by prompting him to create pieces for their art shows.
It was through this experience that he learned how to market and promote his work. His graffiti past also taught him to remain in the moment when creating work but also to consistently brainstorm new ideas well in advance. “I still see [my art] as kind of impermanent,” he says.
“With graffiti art, you do the next spot or whatever it is that you want to do, but you’re thinking of the next one because you don’t know how long that will run. It becomes about the next thing, and that really kind of stuck with me. Even when I’m working now, I’ll be doing a painting and be thinking five paintings ahead. It’s really about getting the busy work done so that I can get on to the next thing.”
In 2002, Colman moved to New York and worked odd jobs while pursuing his burgeoning art career. This relocation caused him to completely reconsider the direction of his work. While in school, Colman could create his pieces in a roomy studio on campus, but space constraints in his new Lower East Side apartment caused him to downsize the images in his paintings considerably.
“There was no real room to work,” he says. “There was this little kitchen, which was more like a hallway, which was probably the only big wall in the apartment. So I would set up these paneled pieces for ink drawing, and they were probably about eight feet long and two feet high. When I was working on them, I really couldn’t back up to see how the piece was progressing, so I was always really close. So that’s how the really little stuff started because I was only looking at this stuff from only a foot or two away.”
The constrictions actually became beneficial to Colman, because in turn, he began taking a more detailed approach to his portraiture and started integrating a sense of plot throughout his images. These narrative elements, which can be found in his current work, started out as little ways of incorporating embellished versions of his own experiences into his paintings but have since taken on a life of their own.
“A lot of the work that I’m working on, it’s rooted in that narrative thing because that’s where I started, and I still feel really close to it,” he says. “But the work now is finding different ways of abstracting that narrative.”
Since 2002, his work has struck a chord with numerous galleries, including V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, White Walls Gallery in San Francisco, and New Image Art Gallery in Los Angeles. Colman started noticing that galleries on the West Coast were gravitating towards his style, so in 2005, he decided that it would be in his best interest to relocate to Los Angeles.
“At that point, most of the galleries that I was showing at were located, if not in Los Angeles, then on the West Coast,” he says. “Why spend all of that money on shipping work over when I could just drive or walk it over?”
Creating a new life in California proved to be quite an adjustment for Colman, who had spent his entire life on the East Coast. “Los Angeles is just very different,” he says. “The pace of the lifestyle was and still is very different to me — like I don’t think that I could ever get comfortable there. You don’t have that thing where you just run into people. I’m more prone to being a hermit and working.”
Colman’s move to the West Coast (he currently lives in San Francisco) has since inspired him to add abstract elements, geometric designs, and high-voltage colors to his repertoire. It also motivated him to continue redefining his personal aesthetic. “Any time that you make any sort of change,” he says, “it changes your work, and it changes your perspective.”