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Richard straddling a horse and a mule at the
Grand National Livestock Exhibition, age about 12.
About Me
My greatest works are still within me. I began formally oil painting at
the age of 13 with an Italian master named Carmello Di Simone. I painted
through high school, primarily to get the girls naked. I entered the
California
Institute of Art, the newly formed Walt Disney college on a full
scholarship in the school of art for painting. I was in the first
graduating class
of 1972. That same year I sailed to Japan, spending 16 days at sea,
where
I studied Karate to the level of black belt, and continued to oil paint
for two years.
Dear Gangster
At that time I hadn't realized the obvious connection between minerals
and oil paint. Color pigments from cave painting 40,000 years ago, the
umbers, the ochres, the reds and oranges, through the crushed Lapis
Lazuli to
produce the ultramarine blue of the Renaissance up till the present,
are all derived from crushed minerals.
My future wife Junko at the grand piano at the age of about 8.
Returning to States, I enrolled at the Gemological Institute of America
and graduated as a Gemologist in 1978. In 1979, I began to travel to
Burma,
the source of the finest Ruby, Sapphire, and Jadeite in the world. Since
my
first love, and my first memories were of color, it suited me to deal
in colored stones.
In Burma I began to travel to increasingly remote areas, where I
encountered and became fascinated with the myriad tribes who have
inhabited areas not seen for decades, and had remained unchanged for a
centuries. For 15
years I traveled through wilderness, war zones, malarial mountains, up
rivers where nobody else had been for 50 years, and nobody has returned to
since. I
photographed these people and wrote about them.
Richard with Judith Factor Hilton 1972
In 1997, my book "The Vanishing Tribes of Burma" was published in
London, and launched at the United Nations for the International Decade
of the
World's Indigenous People. I had photographed over 35 different tribes
and had written about them, something no ethnologist had attempted since
Sir George Scott 100 years earlier. However I realized, I had been
distracted. I had stopped painting.
Chinese Akha girl in Yunnan near the Wa Autonomous region.
Photography is the stolen moment. The lighting, the framing, the
subject were simple after years of painting. Painting is pure creation,
a blank
canvas in an empty universe devoid of direction or stars to light the
way, where the painter is God, and creates his universe with his
imagination. After 10 years of never holding a brush, I have returned to
oil
painting to explore my own symbols, to release my own mania in a series
called, "A Week of Seduction".
The Week of Seduction is a series of ten canvases, I am
currently
painting number eleven and will post it here when it is complete. Come
along with me if you will and follow my brushes through
"The Week of Seduction.
Paintings
Richard K. Diran |
