Close Encounters: The Paintings of David Rice

The Pacific Northwest is perhaps the wildest, most breathtaking region in the continental United States. With its combination of mountain ranges, conifer forests, lakes, rivers, and ancient sequoias looming over the California coast, the geography and texture of Wyoming, Montana, California, and Oregon return us to North America’s primordial past. It reminds us of when the natural world had infinite scope, infinite variety, and a magisterial beauty that was precisely what the Romanticist painters and poets had in mind when they thought of the overpowering majesty and terror of the sublime. How else to explain the feeling one gets when the senses are under siege by an ocean, blankets of green forest, ice-capped mountain peaks, and a big blue canvas sky, all bunched together like some eclectic, densely packed diorama? If there is one place for nature to inspire an American artist, it is surely in the Northwestern U.S.

David Rice grew up near Aspen, Colorado, the son of a ski instructor. From an early age, he loved the natural world. “There’s something about it,” Rice says. “I like the idea that we [animals and humans] get to share space together. You can do it in a way where we don’t affect each other.”

Rice has always been enthralled by being in the living presence of a wild animal, and explains how life in Colorado, Oregon, and time spent at Yellowstone National Park has afforded him the opportunity to capture what he describes as the “magic” of catching sight of bighorn sheep, bobcat, fox, and elk. He’s seen some of North America’s big game in and around Yellowstone, and the rural town he grew up in in Colorado was accustomed to black bears ambling through the community, napping in the trees during the day like languorous beasts from children’s books. It’s this peaceful, provincial coexistence that informs many of Rice’s paintings, which, in their depiction of North American wildlife, suggest a tender, fragile humanity.

The inception stage for Rice often begins with photography. He’ll go outside with his DSLR camera and shoot whatever fragments of wilderness he comes across, whether it is a “barren landscape” or a “weird angle” that gives him a novel vantage into the contours of nature. He then uses these photographic references as the early framework for his sketches and, ultimately, his paintings. For Rice, seeing animals in the wild is critical to his artistic process. “[It’s important] to understand how they move, see where their joints are.” But glimpsing iconic North American creatures like the bald eagle, red fox, and mountain lion, animals entrenched in centuries of American mythos and Native American folklore, is more than just a means to anatomical accuracy. “Being able to see [these animals] in real life is what makes it important or seem like more than just [for example] deer: you see that deer, that specific one. You don’t just group it into that category of deer. That connection is kind of the whole reasoning behind what I do.”

Rice discusses the magic of seeing an animal in the wild, the ineffable electricity of locking eyes with a big cat, a moose, a brown bear. It wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that much of Rice’s work, and perhaps the foremost raison d’être of his art in general, grows out of those private, isolated moments where humans and wild animals lock eyes, for a brief moment mutually acknowledging the swirling maelstrom of curiosity, trepidation, and awe behind those eyes. It’s a very specific, fleeting sort of magic, when the chasm between species briefly but rapidly closes, and you feel yourself temporarily tangled up in the inner life of another living thing. It’s the interloper’s magic.

After collecting enough reference photos, from both his own shooting outdoors and wildlife photography from publications like National Geographic, he’ll pull all the images together and “frankenstein” them in Photoshop.

When he’s stitched together a rough approximation he’s satisfied with, he starts sketching from that amalgamated reference image. He builds his backgrounds with multiple coats of paint to achieve the layered texture apparent in much of his work. He deliberately allows earlier coats to “poke through” to give the wallpaper the tattered, threadbare aesthetic he’s fond of. After that comes the animal subject of the composition, followed by the “embellishments” that he says “help to emphasize the enchanting quality a lot of paintings possess.”