Breaking the Rules

In recent years, painter Ron Hicks has been looking at his work with a thoughtful eye. “What have I been hiding behind?” he asked himself.

- 

The answer was the confines of art itself. To get out, he would have to break some stuff.

“I found that I was using representational art as a pretext to keep my work a certain way,” he says. “That’s what I was hiding behind. And to get out, I had to move toward my own truth and do it in a creative way that wasn’t dictated by rules and discipline. There is this notion that, ‘This is what art is.’ And it doesn’t have to be.”