Artist RJ Raizk’s work spans a multitude of forms from graffiti-esque hand-drawn patterns to abstract canvases with aqueous washes of color. He also utilizes a variety of media from acrylic paint to oils, inks and spray paint. Yet, all of Raizk’s creations have common “organic” threads.
As a child growing up in small town Ohio, Raizk began spontaneously drawing on walls and shutters, adding what would become his signature mark to the built world around him (a practice not discouraged by his mother, who saved some of the drawings). Today, he still applies pattern to walls – albeit now with a rigorous perfection that rivals digitally printed wallpaper and fabric but also surpasses them as hand-done, one-of-a-kind pieces.
“As a kid I was drawing on walls and shutters and now it’s my career,” said Raizk, who refers to the wall works as murals. “It’s kind of like what I was born to do.”
After high school, Raizk followed his late sister, an interior designer, to New York City, where he obtained his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and began doing pop-up mural installations for events in clubs and restaurants. Designers took note and his New York client base grew to include corporations, fashion designers and homeowners. When Raizk’s sister returned to New Orleans, where she had attended Tulane, he moved to the Big Easy and embraced what he describes as the “anything goes vibe.”
Raizk’s wall designs reference shapes found in the natural world. Coral (a pattern that calls to mind the iconic squiggles of artist Keith Haring), Circles, Fronds, and Leaves are among the pattern names in his portfolio. But Raizk says they are more the result of the “free flowing” way he channels an interior feeling than an actual representation of the world around him. Feelings, emotions, music, and a love of color and texture are the core of his inspiration.
“It’s very internal versus outward inspiration,” he said.
While Raizk’s interior world is also the source of his abstract canvases, the organic quality of these typically large works is not stylized. There are canvases reminiscent of ink diffusing in water, works resembling topography, applications of paint with the liquid movement of lava, and pieces that look like sunlight breaking through the rocky mouth of a cave.
Whatever the medium and category of work, and whether the end result represents the minutia or vastness or the world, the process for Raizk remains constant. By tapping into the universe within, he naturally and intuitively conjures striking images of the cosmos around us.
