While Tony Ward and Daniel Louis Rivas were waiting for their independent film, One Lucky S.O.B., to get green lit, they started investigating other creative avenues. Daniel, a painter for many years, knew Tony had been keenly involved in art and photography, so he arranged for them to have a show.
“We just decided that we have a good time hanging and laughing and contriving the next fiasco,” says Tony. “It only seemed right that we stop wasting precious seconds of our lives and make some paintings, make some money, make some new friends, and live fucking life like true artists … loudly!”
Herewith is an artistic conversation of loud proportions:
How has the experience of painting helped you make any sense of life?
DANIEL:
I try and stay in the moment. It’s the connection in all things living & non-living that makes up the vaults in our mind. You don’t want to hold on to the perfect moment forever. It’s letting it go that gives this its real value. We are just documenting the experience of existence. We were here, trust me.
TONY:
Doing these paintings is like a swift kick in the balls that sucks your breath away. I am a mad person when I paint, when I create. I want to shove my cock into LIFE and fuck the daylights out of it and serve it up on a tray for the world to gaze upon!
I see. Well then…what were the challenges of collaborating on this project and sharing a single canvas?
DANIEL:
No unique minds are similar. The more we disagree and see each other’s point of view, the longer we can maintain our creativity together. The harder it, is the longer we can sustain the freshness of the always-changing world.
TONY:
Danny is faster than me at doing his thing. I am much slower and have to meditate and find the images in my mind, and then I am so damn anal about my technical and how I will achieve a specific image in my mind onto the canvas. I was never schooled for painting so every time I step to the canvas I am giving myself a great challenge, like realistic cadaver parts, reptiles, or, of late, a giant Dodo bird.
DANIEL:
Painting on a canvas is a moment and passing feeling that you have to act on, or it forever vanishes. I am an action painter.
TONY:
We are two totally different humans. He uses mainly one brush, his favourite, I need many, and have lots, and I am always complaining I need more. He jerks off fast, I jerk it slowly, methodically. He attacks the canvas, I stare at it, stare it down hard!
You got to paint over one another’s work. How did you handle the emotions?
DANIEL:
That’s when the ego has to take a backseat to creation and revelation. At first, it was frustrating, but I’ve learned to accept and trust this experiment of ours will reveal more truth in the end. I pace a lot when it’s Tony’s turn at the canvas, or I take a nap, and hold my breath and pray for the best.
TONY:
I got over it, especially because it’s mostly me doing the over-painting and him pacing around behind me. Now, I just don’t give a shit. I think it shifted to “what-the-fuck-ever!” when Danny varnished over one of the paintings I particularly loved with a dirty brush and fucked the motherfucking painting up. That has become a part of the art now.
DANIEL:
Sometimes it’s like birth or rebirth, and sometimes it’s like going to the dentist. But having the dentist be a really rad, hot chick with double D’s and thick extraterrestrial lips.
You definitely have some distinct approaches to the canvas.
DANIEL:
I am trying to shed the lizard skin and become the man I was meant to be, putting the pain back in painting.
TONY:
Everything kind of disappears when I paint—just a brush, colour, and sweat dripping down my forehead into my eyes. I want to believe I can do anything; as a matter of fact, I know there is nothing creative that I cannot do. I just have to wrap my mind around it and step to it!
Is the collaboration why your paintings often explore the notion of identity?
TONY:
Identity is liquid, gaseous, vapour trails, it’s perfect like that. Like a smelly wet fart! If I am trying to say anything in my art, it’s STOP with the identity thing, it’s killing you! I don’t self ID, I think it is crippling and self hatred. I LOVE MY QUANTUM REALITY!
Are the masks in your paintings another form of identity?
DANIEL:
The masks represent our transitions from what the world labels us to what we really are at the core. What you think of me is not really what I am. Are feelings facts or fleeting ego? I’ve always been obsessed with masks from every region & time period. Aztec masks, African masks. The everyday masks we wear to get through this experience. The world is trying to kill us. The cigarette companies, the alcohol companies, the fast food companies. Where do we draw the line and just be us in a world of ignorance? Is the mask permanently glued on our faces? That’s why we titled a painting, and called our last New York show, “Is That Your Real Meat Face?”
TONY:
Everybody mentions masks. They are not masks! I reveal what is under masks!!!
How has this project unmasked the relationship between the two of you?
DANIEL:
It has made us more in tune with what the other is going through at the present moment. Being an artist, actor, model, hooker, waitress, it’s all time. Tony and I are hustling and trying to have fun, feed our families, staying one step ahead of the landlord and the law and surviving the best we can.
Moonlighting is a part of the hustling game, do you consider yourselves more artists now than actors or models?
DANIEL:
I think any good, interesting actor is an artist and writer regardless. When you hire me for your movie or your TV show, you get a perspective, a point of view. I live my life with a box of colours that I drag from mystery to mystery. I’ve never been straight off the bus from the Midwest. I am not an L.A. fuck doll.
TONY:
Fuck all that model and actor bullshit!!! It’s a monkey’s job, and it’s getting to be just as glamorous as working at Der Weinerschnitzel.
I was born an artist, I just had to give myself permission to go for it. I have lots to do while I’m still sucking air, and I’d like to leave some hot form of legacy for my children. I look at living life as an art form— it’s not just the obvious, “Hey this is my art thingy!” I am an artist in every minute of my existence. I could be painting, making clothes, gardening, cooking, acting, sexing, taking a crap, whatever. I am an artist.
A crap, huh? Well, speaking more figuratively, what does the creative process drives out of you?
DANIEL:
The hilarity of heartbreak. Travelling around the world making movies. In love, in hate, awake or asleep. With money and without money. How come I’ve always been so fucking weird? Figuring out what I am going to do with the rest of my life. The demons! The hope and the regret.
TONY:
Vomitous layers of gut, bile and plaque! I believe in the exorcism of the creative process, especially while painting. I’ve gotten so worked up I have cried while painting, jerked off—not on my painting—sang, laughed … Really, the best is the shit it drives out of my head!!!
Once it’s all driven out and it’s there on the canvas, what do you see as being beautiful in both your art and art in general?
DANIEL:
I think beauty is a feeling. I find beauty in the action of the moments, movements, and the attack on the canvas. Have you ever been punched really hard in the face? The first thing you see is what’s most absurdly beautiful.
TONY:
Beauty is when someone is screaming their feelings out in the art. I just know beauty when I feel it!
Last question, what do you hope your audience takes away from viewing your collection?
TONY:
I hope it inspires you all to speak, loudly, your mind. Whenever, wherever, and to stir up the muck!!! PEACE, YOU HOT FUCKERS!!!
