Today we’d like to introduce you to Dylan Rabe.
Dylan, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I was born in Chicago and grew up in Beverly, on the far South Side. My mother had immigrated to the United States from Thailand in the early 1970s, while my father was born in New York state but spent much of his childhood in boarding schools in India, where my paternal grandparents were working as Christian missionaries. This mix of backgrounds – ethnic, religious, and cultural – that I was born into seemed utterly normal to me at the time, being all I knew from infancy, but as I got older and my perceptions of the world expanded, I began to appreciate how unusual that blend of influences truly was. In retrospect, I can see how it molded my omnivorous approach to imagery and other creative pursuits.
Like many children, I drew compulsively from an early age, filling sketchbooks with scenes of dinosaurs, animals and whatever else stoked my imagination. As a shy, thoughtful kid with a piercing stare, drawing was my first method of understanding the world around me. It became my mission to achieve that hard-won knowledge of something by finessing and wrangling its form onto a sheet of paper, either by looking directly at it and observing, or by conjuring a reasonably accurate arrangement of lines out of my mind’s eye. Once I had a taste of that small act of mastery, I was hooked.
I loved art as a personal pursuit and a route of escapism (of which myriad others revealed themselves to me during my teenage years, including music, books, and film), but I never anticipated making a career out of it until I was in my final year of high school with no inkling of what I was going to do with my life. In what began a series of fortuitous and tumultuous events, I received a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago that made it possible for me to pursue a BFA. For the next four years I focused intently on oil painting and figure drawing, as portraiture and narrative paintings of people had always appealed to me.
The motivating and self-sustaining effects of art-making took hold around this point, as it felt like the next several years of my life were driven by some metaphysical need to create paintings, and to learn how to make the purest and most honest visual expression I could. Through traumas, heartbreaks, joys and losses, it remained the constant refuge of my early to mid-20s. I graduated from SAIC with a BFA in 2011, and the year that followed was a particularly difficult one. In 2012, my father, who had been my constant supporter and directly responsible for my involvement with art, passed away after a battle with cancer. Following a six-month fallow period in which my painting all but ceased, in the fall of that year I returned to SAIC to pursue an MFA.
Coping with loss in that environment drove my art process deeper inward, seeking to reconcile a turbulent inner world of emotions with the skills of representation and structure that I had developed thus far. Although much has changed in my life today, bridging the gap between those two areas is still my main focus as an artist, and has provided a boundless arena for reflection, anticipation, and processing my experiences.
To sum up the last few years of my artistic life, I have spent much of it painting, organizing and participating in exhibitions, and teaching a range of classes in the Painting and Drawing department at SAIC.
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
I primarily make oil paintings on canvas that are figurative, colorful, and equal parts representational and abstract. The abstraction stems from the fact that my compositions are borne out of automatic, stream-of-consciousness gestures that gradually coalesce into a recognizable image. Since about 2013, I have devised a method of painting that ensures the maximum visibility of these earliest strokes while still allowing for a high degree of finish. This involves using transparent glazes of oil paint over an ink underpainting that is executed directly on an slick oil ground-covered canvas. Erasure in the typical sense is not permitted, as I embrace the curveballs that drips, smudges, and stray lines present along the way.
While at first glance, the paintings may seem meticulously planned and rendered, it is important to me that the gestation of each image be spontaneous, and therefore a surprise not just to the viewer but to myself. Somehow, the paintings all end up being painfully – even embarrassingly – truthful about whatever seems to be happening in my life around the time of their creation, although augmented with heavy doses of surrealism and symbolism. In many cases, the paintings have revealed some essential truth about a situation that I don’t realize until they are completed, and sometimes they have even forecasted the future in a strangely literal manner, much to the astonishment of family and friends who were involved.
I don’t believe there is any mystical quality to this function of painting, but rather that it is a quirk of the way the human mind stores images and ideas. Just think: everything you’ve ever seen, felt, or imagined is lingering somewhere inside your mind, just waiting to be accessed. And some things, often the most important ones, are the most likely to come pouring out when you open the floodgates.
I feel that anyone can develop the ability to use drawing or painting in this way, and that by releasing the bonds on our creativity we can learn a great deal about ourselves and the world around us. If you simply start drawing and see what comes out, you’ll often be surprised!
Do current events, local or global, affect your work and what you are focused on?
I think that artists represent an incredibly empathetic and sensitive way of existing in our world, and that this mindset is greatly needed in our current climate. I go through phases of being preoccupied by national and international news, and then becoming overwhelmed and retreating inward, trying to focus more on my immediate surroundings. The nature of my approach to art means that at times of being influenced by external events, those issues have rather intensely manifested themselves in my paintings, mingling with my direct experiences in a complicated way that I don’t fully understand.
I think that artists can have an important role as social observers and work to raise awareness of certain issues, but I am not always able to bear that responsibility. My role, if I have any, is more focused on leading by example, and encouraging others to wield their innate creativity to achieve greater compassion and understanding.
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
I have shown my work in and around the Chicago area, including at the Beverly Arts Center, Iceberg Projects, Julius Caesar, and most recently in a two-person show with Richard Hull at Rare Visions in Boulder, CO this past summer. My website, www.dylanrabe.com has the most up-to-date gallery of paintings, drawings, and animations (executed in a free-form manner akin to my oil painting process), and I frequently post new work and announcements about upcoming shows and projects there.
Contact Info:
- Website: dylanrabe.com
- Email: dylanrabe@gmail.com
Image Credit:
Dylan Rabe
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