Darick Ritter was born in St. Louis, MO and is presently living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He studied painting at the Kansas City Art Institute and is a new addition to the artist community. With creative interests ranging from graphic novels that never make it to the page to terrible songwriting, he hopes that his recent paintings capture your imagination. They draw equally on subjects like his spiritual experiences as a youth and the newly acquired taste of general, scientific inquiry.
“My work rationally explores the mysteries of subjective experience in human acts of prayer, meditation, art making, fasting, and entheogenic plant consumption. The paintings are metaphors for how these experiences play upon the liminality of consciousness itself, witnessed by the dynamic relationship between surface and depth, figure and ground. Reserving judgment for what might or might not be true about these states, I let the notions of the unknown play out as evolving organisms within the fields built upon the surfaces of my art. In practice, this begins by limiting my material and acceptance of my idées fixes to create a topography of repetitive marks facilitating a free-flowing consciousness. From within this domain, I conjure interruptions in fields of colored ribbons and repeated spiraling helixes; the personalities that arise are biomechanical abstractions that assert their beauty. As I attend with loving care to my garden of characters, the work absorbs my rays of energy, transforming my consciousness into something wholly Other.”
