Richard Pence is a painter based in Jacksonville, Florida. He studied philosophy at Middle Tennessee State University and has worked in construction since 2003, when he started out in the Army repairing barracks and utilities. His abstract work, built from dark grounds, crackle, relief, drip and thrown gesture, carries a builder's attention to surface and a philosopher's question underneath it: what can be communicated that can't be said.
I think of painting as the most direct way one person can reach another. Language works by marking off what a thing is not, and it never quite hands the thing itself across. A painting can carry the shape of a feeling whole, to a stranger who will never hear me explain it, and their body knows it before their words do.
I don't paint to send a message. I rarely know what I'm going to paint when I start. I work until I catch a thread, and from there the thinking happens in my hands and eyes rather than in sentences. Paint gets dragged, scraped, cracked, built into relief, or thrown at the canvas in a single motion that can't be taken back. Whatever reaches the viewer is a byproduct of that work, not its plan.
Anything I say about a painting afterward, this included, is a story told after the fact. Often I only find out what a painting is later. The two dancers in The Duet showed up three days after the paint dried, when someone asked me what it was called. I don't consider that an accident. It's the part of me that knew before I did.
A painting doesn't need to reach everyone. Some people walk past. Others stop without knowing why, because certain shapes, weights and gestures mean something to us before we have a word for them. What keeps them there is the trace of another mind at work, and they find it the same way I did: by looking long enough.