Artist Talk & Studio Visit

Sunday, May 3rd | 2 - 5 PM
Artist Talk: 3 - 4 PM

Join us for an Artist Talk with Rick Vian and Sue Carman-Vian at their Royal Oak studio, where more artworks will be on display.

418 East 3rd St.
Royal Oak, MI 48067

RICK VIAN

THE RAPTURE OF UNDERSTANDING NOTHING

After decades of trying to understand the universe, and existence, and what we are, and how we should think, and behave and all that, I finally gave up; a long time ago. The only sensible thing left to do was to make art. For me that meant “to paint”. The problem remained as to what I was doing as an artist in the midst of all this. Since I am now fairly secure in the fact that I understand Nothing, (and “understanding Nothing” is not the same as “not understanding anything”) I approach a canvas in the same way I approach the universe. I am confronted with chaos in which I seek some kind of order. The chaos consists in all the blind, random marks I put all over the canvas to start the painting. The order is all of the shapes and composition that I find in that chaos and create out of the mess; rethinking, reworking, over and over, until it looks like something that has always been there.

RICK VIAN | Where Monkeys Provoke Tigers, 2025 | Polyurethane and oil on canvas, 60 × 48 inches