Rick Blasing - February 2019

I am a 30-something someone who by day is a cog in the cold and calculating machine of the banking industry. By night......well, some nights, late nights, I occasionally paint.

I grew up in Watertown but have lived in Madison most of my adult life. I also lived in Portland, Oregon for a couple years and in Dubuque, IA for one year.

For nearly a decade I painted only landscapes. In 2017 I began feeling disenchanted with my landscapes and felt like they were failing to capture the essence of nature that I wanted. In October of 2017, while in Dubuque, I decided I needed to change and reinvent my approach to painting. After seeing the works of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko at the Art Institute of Chicago in September of 2017, I felt inspired to try my hand at painting my own kind of abstract art. I wanted to paint what you could not see in physical reality and decided to use elements like color, line, and shape to represent my conscious, subconscious, and unconscious thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

I call this collection of my work, "Supraorbital", which means, "situated above the orbit of the eye." These paintings are my artistic visions of what lies beyond what our eyes can see. They are paintings of mood, intention, spontaneity, atmosphere, harmony, discordancy, dreams, nightmares, love, and loss. Some of my paintings are more abstract, less subjective, and thus more open for interpretation. Others (especially the more recent paintings), are more literal and less abstract, and incorporate figures, faces, and other symbolism.

I hope you enjoy my work!