TV: Hi Rhys, thank you for doing this, I’ve been a fan of your work since I first saw some of your paintings at a gallery in 2022. You were in a group show at Thomas VanDyke Gallery that December and I was so excited for your solo show we did in January of 2024. I’ve seen your work evolve just over these last few years and know you’ve gone through some life changes of your own. I’m excited to learn more about your work and what fascinates you. I’m sure you have had many different influences throughout your life. Can you tell me about an early memory of making something creative?

RZ: I have a very clear memory of the first drawing I made that was good. I was 10 years old, but even then I knew that it was worth looking at and that no one else could have made it except for me. All artists know the experience where you make something and completely forget yourself, as if you're channeling something from some unknown place. It's an elusive thing. I don't think it's possible to always or only make art in that spirit but it's wonderful when it happens.

Anyway, I was in fifth grade sitting at my desk. My teacher then, as in so many of the classrooms I knew, would decorate the bulletin board with seasonally appropriate displays like paper cut-outs and signs and things. On this particular day, it must have been January or February, I looked over at the bulletin board and it had a picture of the cartoon character Mr. Magoo dressed in colonial era military garb, à la George Washington and y'know a lot of other stuff referencing Presidents' day or whatever. It was no doubt the distinct profile of Mr. Magoo that caught my eye. I looked at it and tried to copy it, as I would often do with cartoons and comic books and such. But then something happened. I noticed the alphabet hanging above the bulletin board and drew that too, and then all the other stuff, including the text in the signs and the scalloped paper border and so on. It was like, "Oh you just draw what you're looking at.” I still think it's an interesting idea, like a flat landscape or an architectural still-life.

I was always interested in drawing and painting but except for the few oil paintings I knew from my parents' and grandparents' houses, mostly beach landscapes, I experienced art almost entirely through books. In a particular art teacher's classroom I recall a set of books about various old masters, I think it might have been a Time-Life series or something similar, and I looked at it every chance I got. I remember being totally baffled by the connection between the stuff in the books and the paintings I had seen in person. Even so, I looked really carefully and was in fact quite captivated by the paintings I did get to see in real life. In particular I remember looking at a kitschy little souvenir type painting of Don Quixote that my grandmother had at her house. It had this super thick impasto and, I don't know, it somehow gave me a sense of how a person could make something like that.

TV: That is great to hear. Not all artists can hold on to those early inspirations. It’s really interesting what type of art people surround themselves with, even people who aren’t totally into any art scene. Most people do actually make some effort to have some element of creativity around them, like it’s a natural thing. It just goes to show that artistic influence goes deep, sometimes in very unexpected ways, and that people draw connections through art that are sometimes unintended, it’s pretty cool. Do you think artists today have a responsibility to history?

RZ: I definitely do but I would qualify that in two ways. One is that I don't think of that responsibility as being at all unique to artists and the second, which follows from the first, is that I have a very expansive view of what constitutes history.

At the risk of being excessively oblique, I'll attempt to explain. I only started seriously making visual art in the past couple years. Before that I put virtually all of my creative energy into making music. And so I think often about the different experiences called forth by visual art and music. And I think the main thing is the relationship to time. Music, like other performative arts, is experienced as a direct passage through time, whereas visual art is kind of like a trick to give the sensation of experiencing time from the outside. Ever since childhood I've felt consumed by the mystery of how the future becomes the past. On one hand the present is the only thing that's really real and accessible but on the other hand what the hell is it and how long does it last? To notice it is to notice it escaping.

So in terms of responsibility I might say that to take art seriously means to take time seriously. History is not merely a set of events. Nor is it a story that explains a certain group of people. It's the totality of the situation each of us inherits at any given moment.

TV: This is so fascinating, I love philosophical pondering like this and the approaches creative people take to analyze and add commentary to the puzzles they find in life. I’ve kind of started to think of art as a language used to communicate thought, that’s influenced over time, adding some of this, forgetting some of that, with different slang and jargon that may be profoundly understood, or wildly misinterpreted. What do you hope people feel, or not feel, when they encounter your work?

RZ: There's an important distinction between feeling and thinking. And for me the thinking part comes naturally whereas the feeling part is something I work towards. I don't presume to tell people what they should feel but I do care deeply that they feel something, anything.

This is probably because my kind of art, and I suppose my personality, can sometimes seem kind of over-intellectualized. I know some artists have a hard time talking about or writing about their work but for me the hard part is stopping once I get started. I operate from a viewpoint that everything is potentially interesting, even boredom itself, so it's easy to get carried away. I get ideas from all sorts of places but a huge amount of them come from books. And as a voracious devourer of novels, poetry, and books about history and science, I almost never have trouble thinking of paintings I want to make. The trouble for me is having the time to paint them all. But that thing where a work of art just stops you in your tracks and makes you realize you're alive. That's what I aspire to.

TV: This reminds me of something singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell said about not understanding how anyone who’s living at all could have writers block, rather, she sees it as “fear of what they’re feeling”. Also, she turned to painting if she couldn’t think of what to write or sing. I know a lot of artists who have used their music, writing, or painting to process or address something very difficult, sometimes very personal in their lives. Has there been a time when art helped you process something painful?

RZ: Four years ago, just before my father died and I was getting ready to go visit him to say goodbye, I found myself working on a little still-life of a plastic skull. I remember suddenly realizing how absurd that was. But then how strangely comforting it felt as well, the poignant and the ridiculous fused into one sensation. It was as if I had to sneak up on myself.

Even now it seems mysterious. Perhaps it was in part because of my father's own dark sense of humor. It felt brave to face death in that way. I knew that he would want me to paint exactly what I felt like painting, and not to let a concern that something might seem morbid or disrespectful or whatever get in the way.

TV: Death is a difficult thing to process for anyone. I imagine the act of doing something physical and creative can be a visceral and cathartic relief. Being able to look at that process with honest perspective is impressive and I’m sure that outlook informs all of your work.Can you describe the physical process of your painting?

RZ: I almost always paint on wood panels and always with oil paint. I go through phases where I do more or less underpainting or preparatory drawing. I used to slap a lot of paint on in a thick layer, alla prima style, but for the past few years I've generally been underpainting deliberately and building it up layer by layer. Lately I'm mixing it up between the two.

I tend not to paint from photographs. Formerly, I would make weird little still-life set ups in my studio and then paint them from direct observation. In the past year or two I've been inventing stuff more and more. Recently I'm kind of going back in the other direction.

TV: It’s cool that you continue to explore and as you say, “mix it up”. What’s next for your art practice?

RZ: I'm interested in exploring some ideas with graphic arts. Things like zines, pamphlets, posters, etc. Living in New York City you get exposed to so much stuff like that. I want to try putting some of the things I've developed in my painting into that world and see what happens.

TV: There is certainly no place like New York City, and it’s a great venue to try new forms of creativity. I’ll be on the lookout for your new works and projects. Thanks so much Rhys!

Rhys Ziemba lives and works in Brooklyn, New York