The news of Richard Tracy’s death at age 89 has gotten me thinking about the life and legacy of this public artist and Lewis County original, a creator of what might be called “feral sculptures” standing for decades along Harrison Avenue like an Easter Island of styrofoam.
“Art comes to you in moments,” Tracy once said. “Art comes to you because you’re out here and you’re vulnerable. You get ideas by just running around.”
I first met “RichArt,” as he called himself, nearly 25 years ago. A friend of mine, a budding journalist named Aaron Clark, had a contract from an overseas publication (I think it was in Japan) to do a news feature on RichArt.
I tagged along with Clark for his interview and an art class RichArt gave for us in his stately 1911 Centralia home. He escorted us down long, dark corridors stacked with art and supplies to his basement studio.
We created collages that day on large sheets of thick paperboard. RichArt had stacks of his own creations to show us what he had in mind and inspire us. Think curls and globs of paint, like different colors of toothpaste squeezed out in looping lines on a blackboard, along with cutouts from magazines framed by rectangles and lines.
What struck me most was that part of the art project involved us getting out scissors to cut into our artwork and his own, then taping them together to make a mash-up of our creativity and his.
If RichArt liked the final result, he kept it. If not, he gave it to us.
Can you imagine another artist asking you to cut up his work? RichArt, who made art from trash, saw everything around him as potential raw materials for something new, even his own finished paintings.
I think I still have my RichArt painting somewhere. I hope so. The artist retired a decade ago and now that he has passed away, there won’t be the chance to create another. And there won’t be another person like RichArt.
He was a gonzo artist. In fact, some of his artwork looked like Gonzo, the hook-nosed muppet character.
Utterly taken by his own artistic vision, RichArt was never afraid to be an oddball.
He would root through Dumpsters to find a piece of rubbish that struck him as having possibilities. He’d haul it home and find a place for it among the fences and shrubs of the “Art Yard” he built on his half-acre property. Sometimes he’d carve into it, add a set of eyeballs or tape together lengths of rubber hose to give it hair. Occasionally if it didn’t seem right, he’d turn it upside down and suddenly it all just worked.
He loved letting things age outside. The patina of time (some might call it mildew) added depth to his creations.
“It’s almost like it was dipped in baptism,” he told The Chronicle’s Dan Schreiber in 2009. “It comes out alive. It’s dead when you make it, there’s not much too it. But boy, the wind and the rain and the age can put a lot into it. You see it and you understand it. Everybody does.”
His house, at 203 M Street, sits along the main entrance to downtown Centralia. When RichArt began accumulating and creating his art sometimes in the 1980s — towers of styrofoam and wood painted in zig-zags, swaying metal, dangling wind chimes and twirling reflectors — some observers considered it a scandalous eyesore; a pile of junk greeting visitors to the Hub City.
Others were taken with with unique eye with which he curated and combined his finds, crafting castoff trash into faces or captivating abstract creations.
“I take the garbage and someday it’ll go back to garbage,” he told a documentary film crew in 2001. “I get wood, I get scraps, I get all kinds of stuff, and out of your scraps I become part of you.”
He welcomed visitors, energized by their interest. For a $5 donation he’d give a 55-minute art lesson. He preferred teaching groups of five people.
A hand-painted sign at the property read “NO TALKING JUST DO.”
The 2001 documentary about RichArt by Vanessa Renwick and Dawn Smallman captures his whimsical outlook and offers a fine view of the Art Yard in its prime.
The 23-minute film debuted in Olympia’s Capitol Theater. I went up for the show and attended a Q&A with RichArt afterward. It was something to see a room full of art aficionados asking respectful questions to this quirky, grizzled artist whose most recent full-time job was as janitor at Yard Birds.
Speaking of which, RichArt made a delightful appearance in another unrelated documentary, this one a 2009 film about the Yard Birds Shopping Center. RichArt was talking about the time a gila monster lizard got loose from the store’s pet department.
“That thing scared me so much and that idea scared me much,” Tracy said in the movie, as wild-eyed as the lizard he feared. “You can’t be with that grin on your face having a good day when there’s a gila monster up there.”
In the closing moments of his 2001 Art Yard documentary, he told the film crew that he had struggled with mental illness and was briefly institutionalized. Medication left him a vegetable, but pursuing his art freed him, he said.
What will Richard Tracy’s legacy be? For the generations of passers-by who saw his Art Yard every time they came into town, his eccentric estate was a reminder to Centralia and all its visitors that you can be passionately dedicated to your life’s calling without taking yourself or even the outcome of the work itself too seriously.
“Struggle, struggle, struggle,” he said, “but I tell you, if you don’t know who you are and you’re out there trying to find a spot for yourself, just go down one of the roads and never look back.”
Brian Mittge can be reached at brianmittge@hotmail.com. He’d love to hear your stories about RichArt and other Lewis County originals.
