About the Artist
Hello my name is Erik Rashad Clark which is where my artist moniker was born. In the art world I chose to use the name E.Rashad. So I guess part of this presentation will also answer how we got from point a to point b. At the beginning of my art making career started through drawing, specifically all cartoons on nickledeon, cartoonetwork, etc. Any child hood cartoon I could watch I would recreate. I realize I became immersed in these worlds; captivated by the rich detail and images I would be entertained by. However, to detriment this Idea escape and create became a running theme within my work. From a young age I had deep communication issues and felt continuously misunderstood by everyone around me. This growing disconnect I creating a feeling of needing to create worlds of my own in order to understand myself and relate to others.
Visually where we start off would be my high school A.P. ART thesis. This was my 1st introduction into synthesizing a clear vision and relating to an audience through visual and written statement (Basically my kryptonite at the time). The theme dealt with the idea of capturing the visual essence of someone and interpreting the world around them fluid design and color. The media I used heavily involved pastels, and ink, sometimes interrupting the background by cutting into it (almost like creating. Relief spot. My 2nd thesis dealt with the same idea but through new material. The point of this collection was to play with texture like letting the ribbed area of carboard be exposed to using rolled up masking tape as painting area. The main point was define a new area of space besides the square. I think at this point I was comfortable with portraiture style to really help me understand people on a deep empathic level. While also using self-portraiture to help understand myself, simultaneously using my visage as a control when playing with new media.
This being phase 1 art experience I was very much inspired by artwork in my area, that are area being Chicago where I grew up. I had easy access to visual art since my mother was and artist and had many pieces by a local artist named Annie Lee. Her images of the black experience captured faceless figures wrapped in specific many different emotional driven scenes. These images lined the walls of my house along with my mother’s work. But I also had access the Chicago institute college of art which allowed me to see artists like Ivan Albright, Salvidor Dali and Rene Magritte whose work deal with the surreal in different ways. to Being somewhere in my late teens, you could not tell me that I was going to be surrealist artist.
Moving into my second phase I knew I wanted to explore my fascination with oil and acrylic paint. In a way this was to get out of my box and explore the mediums of artist I was inspired by. Initially I used the portrait method once again in order to capture the experience of my model as I saw it. But I was allowing my some exploration into abstraction in order to be my free with in my process and application of material. I could be rigid in my use of realism and I wanted to release that control as I felt I was forcing on myself to make that way. Now releasing the form and caring less about specific commitment to realism I was more so interested in exploring the emotional aspect that only paint can represent when you succumb to its nature.
But I didn’t stop there, my sketch book pages started become more important to me as if they were pieces of art on their own. Soon the became rich illustrative scenes that would form from randomly drawing a mask but then creating and entire world around that one item. The more I delved into making these detail snap shots of a moment in world, the more I wanted to bring these images into the 4D/ Our world. I began experimenting making objects from my sketches, makings mask, outfits, head pieces, and more.
During the 2nd phase I has more knowledge of the world of art history allowed me to experiment more with ideas and material. Artists I was inspired by were Basquiat, Jasper Johns, and especially Marcel Duchamp. Each one of these artists were ambassadors from their own highly cultivated sense of material as metaphor or using art to question instead of just being beautiful. What really grabbed at this point in my life ( probably mid 20’s overall) was the idea of dadaism; the idea that art is justified and can be applied to everything based on creating or applying meaning.
My 3rd Phase is where I am currently at this point in my life account for the last 9 years. In this time, I was a teacher in my home neighborhood to at risk youth. Again my ability to connect with people was not where I wanted it and now I also had to navigate setting aside my emotions for the class. To be honest this was one of the hardest things I ever did. In order to release a lot of tension, or undealt with feeling I would create portraits of some of my students.
I wanted the audience to feel the person they were looking at and not just see them. I used a lot of found material and range of mixed media and styles to capture feelings on a surface.
As well as my doll series which explores abstracting the female figure through the material of her garment, which plays into a theme of (black boys playing with dolls)
Artists that were an inspiration currently within this spectrum of my work, are Nick Cave, Kara Walker, and Kehinde Wiley. They each represent an aspect of world-building I respect and am trying myself.
Lastly is my more current work (Black boys play with dolls) which accounts my past relationship in the form of these scenes encapsulated by these dolls that are breaking into or world. I use a mix of material but the main focus is on the reality of making the outfit the dolls are wearing. In this series I’m playing with a lot of themes like material as metaphor, low vs high art, gender norms, world building and more. Though the main focus of this series is exploring the idea cycling through emotions and how to synthesize/relate them though art to be understood
