LESLIE RICE

Being involved in A Permanent Mark: the impact of tattoo culture on contemporary art is a three hundred and sixty degree experience for Leslie Rice, a ‘spiritual homecoming’ of sorts. The acclaimed artist and two-time Doug Moran Portrait Prize winner, who also owns and operates two LDF Tattoo studios in the Sydney suburbs of Marrickville and Newtown, explains he “learnt to draw and tattoo images in Townsville. I’ve taken it somewhere else now, but it’s still important to me that it’s where I’ve come from.”1

His path to the tattoo industry seemed a fait accompli, with his father beginning his own legendary tattoo career in 1959 in Fortitude Valley. Les Senior travelled extensively for thirty years, which saw Les Junior born in Liverpool, before the family arrived in Townsville in the early 1980s.

“I grew up in tattoo shops, and it was always considered that that was what I would do. It was never really a question that I’d do anything else. I tattooed for 10 years before I came to art school,”2 Rice recalls.

Interestingly for a tattooist and artist of Rice’s standing, he sees a clear and vital distinction between the two practices, though this has not always been an easy separation to maintain.

“Until recently, I saw myself as a tattooist who makes paintings, and now I feel like a painter who makes tattoos. At this point I’m pretty much semi-retired from tattoos because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to balance the two. You can’t ride two horses,”3 Rice professed.

Rice’s leaning towards his contemporary art practice also comes at a time when he has become somewhat dispirited with the direction of contemporary tattooing. While he tips his hat to the passion of the many young tattoo artists coming through the ranks, he’s been around long enough to note a shift in the culture. “It used to be a sort of underground pocket of devotees but now it has gone pop. It’s kind of killed it in a way, which comes back to why I love home-made tattoos, because it kind of flies in the face of the pop.”4

In spite of the clear delineation between ‘Rice the tattooist’ and ‘Rice the contemporary artist’, the two practices are evidently and understandably heavily influenced by each other. “In terms of influence, when I started making paintings you can only really make them from a point of something that you really know intimately…I’m so steeped in the tattoo industry that it was part of my visual language and it seeped in naturally, so I thought there was no reason to fight it… it’s something I was born into, it would be more difficult to shed it. I had to live and breathe it, so to eradicate it now would be kind of difficult.”5

The rest of St. John the Baptist [detail] 2013 Acrylic on velvet 102 x 76 cm

Rice’s paintings – dark, brooding, and highly detailed works on black velvet – balance the gruesome symbolism synonymous with the tattoo industry, and compositional and conceptual elements harking back to Renaissance and Baroque artists such as Peter Paul Rubens. The delicate interplay between dark and light is entrancing, and extends beyond the aesthetic of the work, playing a pivotal role in their conceptual development.

Rice sees his work as dealing with meeting points – “the bit where light turns into dark and shadow”6 – perhaps a subconscious recognition of the convergence of his own distinct practices. “It’s about the penumbra, which is the transitional point of two extremes…this is where I want my work to live; in between being works of fine art and flea market velvet paintings.”7

This tension between high and low art accounts for part of Rice’s interest in Greek mythology, explaining that the hybrid creatures he depicts are in part a metaphor for this collision.

But above all, it’s the artist’s prerogative to explore the impossible and the awe-inspiring through art that draws him to the genre. “Art’s not truth. It deals with it, but not a thick, factual truth, and I enjoy that…Mythology is far more interesting than truth.”8

Image - Above and Overleaf: Leslie Rice

Bacchanal (a Luncheon on the Grass) 2013 Acrylic on velvet 92 x 122 cm

Courtesy of the Artist, Leslie Rice

Notes

1 Quote from an interview with the artist conducted by Curator Eric Nash, 8 August 2014

2 Quote from an interview with the artist conducted by Curator Eric Nash, 8 August 2014

3 Quote from an interview with the artist conducted by Curator Eric Nash, 8 August 2014

4 Quote from an interview with the artist conducted by Curator Eric Nash, 8 August 2014

5 Quote from an interview with the artist conducted by Curator Eric Nash, 8 August 2014

6 Quote from an interview with the artist conducted by Curator Eric Nash, 8 August 2014

7 Quote from an interview with the artist conducted by Curator Eric Nash, 8 August 2014

8 Quote from an interview with the artist conducted by Curator Eric Nash, 8 August 2014