Photo: art by Ro Waters
By Jacob Anderson-Kester
Ro Waters is a visual artist attending Evergreen. Originating from deep in the concrete holdings of Denver, they expressed to me an artistic desire to break free from the bleak shroud an environment of such a type might cast. Fittingly, Ro’s artistic output is predominantly loud in terms of color profiles, utilizing distinct, vivid palettes.
The series depicted in this issue’s spread, Oroboland, is from Ro’s recent program work in the fall of 2019. Jean Cocteau once said, “The worst tragedy for [an artist] is to be admired through being misunderstood,” so I’ll quote their artist statement for this series directly, rather than attempt to sum it up second-handedly: “[Oroboland is] an optical attempt to assess the formal qualities which dictate fantasy art’s function. The formal elements of each painting seek to reinforce to any onlooker that what they are seeing is distinctly not real. In the same way that I find the magical realism of Surrealist artwork to be effective, I hoped to, in this series, tap into the relationship that fantasy art seems to command between the viewer of art and the art itself and use that command of visual attention to subvert common notions of what fantasy is meant to do, and what it might look like.”
Recently, I sat down with them to ask them some more broad questions regarding their art and their motivations behind it.
The most apparent thing, just from the most literal sort of interpretation of your art, is that it utilizes a lot of very bright color palettes. Can you speak to the ways in which that reflects or separates from your artistic identity?
“A lot of it comes from a place of me approaching art as art history. Color is what invented modern art to me. Artists like [Henri] Matisse* and their decision to free color from its descriptive purpose just speaks to me so much. They were able to take this thing that exists all around us—color is what defines the world—and use it to create their own world. It’s just so powerful to be able to leverage something so natural and something so present. That kind of focus started me on that path, because I was interested in art and drawing before learning about that and had been working on it, but I remember coming home the day after learning about Matisse in art history and doing a portrait of my brother. I decided to do all of the light and highlights with really warm tones and all the shadows with really cool tones, and I felt so good. That was the first painting I ever did that I was like okay, cool, I could be an artist. This is what I want to do. Being able to feel like I had some control over [the] formal elements of my work felt so good.”
“But I also just love bright colors. I can’t really explain it; I feel like it removes you from whatever dismal place you’re in.”
I’ve kind of ascertained so far that a lot of your motivation for doing art comes from a place of philosophical or historical reasoning. Why do you feel like that is the way in which you should direct your art and the motivation for it?
“I spent a lot of time drawing and painting as I was growing up; I was an ‘art kid.’ But then I spent a good deal of middle school and high school being hospitalized regularly, and during that time, I didn’t do anything regarding art. So when I got into late high school, I still wanted to do art and make good art, but I felt like I had missed the boat at developing my skills, so I felt like I couldn’t skillfully say or do anything good with art. That feeling got me down for a long time. But then, being able to approach art from a more philosophical, art-theory-focused perspective made me recognize that artists who were never recognized in their own time throughout history have had a mark on history because of the things they had to say more than the things they did. And so I was like, ‘Okay, well, even if I can’t paint something that looks pretty, I can paint something that says something important.’”
In that sense, it seems like a lot of your art is very personal, since it’s coming from such a place of personal reasoning about certain theory and your motivation behind it. Something that I’ve noticed with a lot of artists who are trying to represent themselves in modern spaces is that they tend to have to create a certain depersonalized image of themselves online in order to be represented in any significant way. What is it like having to create those profiles, and how do you feel about doing it?
“I hate it so much honestly. It’s stressful to me a lot of the time, because I do recognize that in modern spaces that is how an artistic voice is spread: by internet presence and internet personality. It’s hard for me, because I don’t post everything I make on Instagram or anywhere, and that’s so much of a struggle. There’ll be times in my process where I’ll be working and just feeling so free and happy throughout the entire process, and then I’ll finish a piece and then be like, ‘Oh, time to post it on Instagram, I guess.’ And sometimes I don’t, and it feels better to just hang it up, but it worries me that somebody would look at my page and assume that that’s it, that this is all I’ve done. This is all I am, this is who I am.”
“But I have been kind of playing with that and recognizing that maybe the next thing I need to do in my artistic career is to get better at that internet presence and build myself more. But I am challenging against the times in my willingness not to do so, because I believe that there is, and has always been, a place for artistic voices to be heard in history, that art will be heard and recognized if it exists. And so rather than putting more effort into making myself an internet personality, I just put more effort into making more things, because I figure the more that there is, the less that it can be ignored.”
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You can support Ro and their art by visiting their Gumroad at gum.co/pinkslip and considering buying some of their art. You can also catch some of their art on Instagram @mesabunny.
*Henri Matisse was a leading figure in modern art at the turn of the 20th century. Like Ro indicated, he is most remembered for his extensive use of intense colors.
