Unedited & Uncensored Tokion Interview by Takeaki Yamazaki

Tokion July 2009
Article/interview with Mr. Tony Ward and Daniel Rivas

Permission: To give ones self the consent and allowance to freely 
explore the infinite array of experience that life offers. Artists 
Tony Ward and Daniel Rivas aim to scream this message directly at the 
audience with their new collection of paintings. Embarking on a 
collaborative journey of creativity together, they’re making it a 
point to explore the relationship of two artists, one medium, the 
process of creation through autodidactic means, and inspiring everyone 
they come across along the way, somehow, in some form.
Having found success in the worlds of modeling and acting, both Tony 
and Daniel are discovering how their past experiences have shaped the 
creative minds they are today. Exploring the notions permission, 
identity, relationships, and the magical act of transforming energy 
from our emotional spectrum into creativity, they evoke a unique world 
that surfaces from each canvas. This most recent endeavor of theirs, 
collaborative painting, sends them preparing for an upcoming European 
tour.
Take - This sort of collaborative painting is relatively unheard of in 
the art world. The process in each individual, which meets on a canvas 
together, creates an interesting situation.
Tony - I love our art, I love what we do, I love the energy we have. 
It’s awkward, it’s uncomfortable; we’re painting over each 
other’s shit [work], mostly me. And not everyone is going love what 
we do, there are always going to be people who hate you, without 
reason, without even knowing you, they’ll hate what you represent, 
hate what you do and what you stand for. And then there are people who 
will love you and love what you do. And to me, they’re all the same. 
I don’t care, It doesn’t matter what anyone has to say about what 
we do. Bottom line, I’m vomiting on a canvas, I’m getting rid of my 
garbage, and I’m processing. That is the process! There’s my 
process, maybe it sucks for you, but there it is.
Daniel - And we have fun. We have a good time doing it; we have a good 
time collaborating. This is just another, very important, avenue that 
we decided to journey and travel down together. We’ve developed a 
friendship and it feels really natural. A lot of things in this world 
feel unnatural, and you know it, you know it in your heart. You know 
when something is off.

Ta- How did it feel when you two first got together? How did you first 
get together and decide to collaboratively paint?
T- I got a part in this movie and we hadn’t seen each other in about 
5 years and I asked him if he knew an acting coach to help me to 
prepare for this film. His acting coach lives downstairs, so we hung 
out more often and one day he called me about this show for Ghetto 
Gloss [a gallery in LA].
D - It all started in here [in this room]. Just brainstorming for 
hours. I’d always been painting, I just called Tony and said lets 
have a show. It was getting close to Xmas, why not? I knew Tony had 
done some photography so I thought I’d show my paintings and he’d 
just show his photography. But then from that, it became this…
T- It was his suggestion. He said, “let’s do some paintings!” I 
had my hesitations about it…
D- It all just led to this, it evolved quickly too. From the early 
paintings to what’s happening right now. And it’s amazing. It’s 
magic because it really hasn’t been that long.

Ta- You both start on this entirely different path and suddenly end up 
here.
T- I think its genius. It’s a ploy of sorts and it’s quite weird. I 
don’t really like Andy Warhol, I mean I respect the entity and the 
energy of that period in time, to launch pop art, it’s impressive, 
its pretty amazing. I’m not saying that we’re doing that, but this 
is pure energy. His energy and my energy, combined together. Saying 
we’re artists and we’re working on the same canvas. Here we are.
Ta- That says a lot about your process, which is not just a solitary 
venture in each of you separately, but rather the meeting of both, the 
collaboration, which results in some interesting art. Can you 
elaborate on this unique process?
D- It’s inspired thought. Often we second-guess ourselves. When it 
comes to acting and painting I try to be there, in that moment, and 
not think too much. In the rest of my life, I’ll see a pretty girl 
and hesitate and Tony will tell me to be more like I am when I’m 
creating art with life. It’s what I’m trying to figure out…
T- Yeah, and the whole thing is that there’s no figuring it out. You 
just have to do it. I view it in a more primitive way. I’ll look at 
it [a painting] and read it, tune into the feeling of whatever is 
going on and then I see it. Sometimes I’ll start painting around it 
and it’s so awkward. Like a sculpture, you just keep chipping away 
because you know the masterpiece is somewhere inside of it, so you 
keep chipping away. I’ll look at something, and every time I feel 
like I can’t touch it. I question, where do I go? What do I do? And 
then this guy, he just attacks it, he’ll put a face right in the 
middle of the canvas, BAM!

Ta- There are bound to be people who will have a certain perspective 
of you two for not having certain credentials or training from 
institutions. On your website, you speak of the autodidactic ability 
and process you both explore. Knowing that your art comes from a 
autodidactic process that you’re capable of discovering, does this 
empower you and your art?
T- It’s a bit crazy, I know it’s powerful because I believe in 
what’s going on inside of me. I believe we all have it, we’re all 
artists in some way. Whatever we’re working on, I believe that that 
is our art. We’re like little bombs, compressed. And if you allow 
yourself to open up and to be open to a number of things, then you 
don’t confine yourself to one specific thing, one specific way of 
thinking. I think...I think I think a lot. [laughs]
Ta- Knowing you have this autodidactic capability gives you the 
ability to approach creativity from a different vector than someone 
who is simply classically trained. Creativity has always come from the 
process of problem solving. You’d never confront these problems and 
experiences without having chosen these particular paths.
D- All that’s happened in our lives has brought us here, to this 
moment. The art world politics don’t really bother me. Those people 
who may question our process, about it not being classically trained. 
Well, were the cavemen? Artists I love like Francis Bacon and Basquiat 
and the idea of Schnabel and Diego Rivera. I just have a healthy 
belief in what we’re doing, in our art, in what we’re creating. The 
politics don’t really bother me.
T- I look at his [Danny’s] stuff and might see and say that it may be 
a bit like Basquiat, but the more I get to know him, the more I see 
that its so purely him, it’s ridiculous. I love Picasso, I’d read 
about people like Telus Lautrec, Egon Schiele, and Bacon, I was really 
moved by these kinds of artists. They were insane. They lived this 
crazy tortured life where they just had to do it [create art]! Now I 
don’t like looking at inspiration at all, I don’t like looking at 
other artist’s works. I want it to come from visions from inside my 
own mind. But whatever moves you. Whatever you gotta do, you gotta do 
it. What strikes you. I’ll never look at one thing and say this is 
me, this is what I do, this is how I do it. My interests fall so 
vastly wide that that exploration feels more free to me. That’s the 
way I want to go about and do it. I’m also such an anal perfectionist 
that that can also get in the way of me, if I start thinking too much. 
And it’s like what you said about the autodidacticism, that process 
of how to do things, it can be such an agonizing process, [at one 
point] it was hurting my stomach trying figuring things out. Like how 
to paint this fur for this painting [a painting of a Civet with a mask 
titled, “Civet doesn’t know the masquerade is over].

Ta- Is there any real identity connected to the paintings?
D- There is, it’s that imprint from our parents, from our DNA. My dad 
is a singer and an artist, I just started forming a relationship with 
him, I hadn’t seen him in about 20 years but there’s something 
I’m channeling that I don’t even know that I know. And why I’m 
attracted to crosses, and this Aztec imagery. I grew up Jewish, I had 
a bar mitzvah. Some of my earliest memories are of being in churches 
and being fascinated by Jesus and often we don’t even know. It’s 
backwards its forwards.

Ta- I read that you spent some time as an ‘artist in residence’ at 
Herman Brood’s atelier. What did you bring back from that experience?
D- I brought back a lot. It was a privilege to be the only American 
artist to be allowed to paint in his studio after he died. I didn’t 
know much about him, then I spent more time in Holland. I had a lot of 
encounters with his ghost. It changed my art, just from research and 
being in that space and talking to people who knew him.
Did it change your technique or your vision? Or have an entirely 
different affect on you?
D- Not really the technique, more so it changed my vision. A lot of 
what we’re talking about is how he actually lived. He was this freaky 
guy, he was a drug addict and a rock n roll guy, and he was out there, 
walking around with a parrot on his shoulder, he lived it. I’m still 
processing that whole experience, there’s something I find very 
kinetic, there’s a deep connection between me and Herman somehow. 
Even though it’s such a different culture and such a different life, 
being there, painting at his studio with his paintings and his bed and 
his porno collection. It was wild.
T- I don’t know much about Herman’s art work but I like what I’ve 
seen. But talking about vision, Danny showed me this article about 
Dash Snow and it talked about his creative process, about his 
alternative lifestyle. It’s an odd dichotomy because we don’t use 
drugs as part of our process. And I look at artists and would think 
you have to suffer or you gotta be crazy. I went through a lot of my 
life thinking I was crazy. My dad, my brother, both a little off, so I 
thought I was crazy. I was reading this book by Osho, ‘Joy,’ and it 
basically says that there are certain things that we do, certain 
affirmations that we have to STOP. NOW. These such expressions of 
ourselves, we manifest. So I stopped calling myself crazy, and stopped 
caring what other people thought about me, just stopped. And I knew 
other crazy people, really crazy people. How this relates to the art, 
Van Gogh cut his own ear off; I’m not going to think such things are 
going to affect my art. In my head I think I have to be this weird 
eccentric artist and wear my pants backwards, wear only red hats 
everyday, or have a fake puppet on my shoulder. Do I have to be that 
dude to be taken seriously as an artist?

Ta- Both of you being actors, I’m sure you’re aware of the mask 
play that is a very significant exercise to explore identity in 
theater. Having masks in nearly every painting, what do these masks 
have to say for you and about you as artists?
D- I wear so many different masks and even I still have the question, 
who the fuck are we? I love masks. Aztec masks, Mayan masks, African 
masks; and we’re always wearing masks, all of us.
T- [we wear] Masks on masks, layers of masks. We wear different faces 
all the time. It’s the façade we’re giving to the world. Different 
parts of our personality come out over that initial facade. Layers of 
crud over other layers begin to build up. In the work, it comes out. 
Underneath all this, this is who we are, and it’s really not cute.
D- I’ve learned a lot from Tony. No matter what situation he’s in, 
he’s himself. It’s tough to be like that in this world. We’re 
always here and there. We constantly change but stay the same. He’s 
his own greatest work of art. We both hang out and act like little 
kids, we have fun. Sometimes you hang out with friends and have to put 
on this mask for this person or that person. It’s always fun to 
rediscover the joy and freedom in creativity.
T- I’ve been stone cold sober for going on 5 years now. More than 
ever I want to be a freak. I want to be freer than I’ve ever felt 
before. And I feel it now. It’s about fighting against the ideology 
of who and what I am. This came from my mother. You have to not hate 
and just be free. Just express yourself the way you have to express 
yourself without worry of others opinions. We’re so caught up with 
eating right, looking right, smelling right, it’s crippling. 
Everything is very PC now. We have facades when it’s actually really 
grim today. I don’t want to ignore that, not with myself, not with my 
art. I have loved ones I care about, I want to inspire and go out and 
be inspired. I’m a cheerleader for insanity. And I’m fascinated by 
kids, they need guidance.
D – and kids need real hope.
Where would you say this art comes from to display such an open 
nakedness? Are you taking off your masks?
D – It’s straight from the heart, for sure. It comes from places 
we’ve all been some only some of us have been. I’ve been through 
addiction, heartbreak, love, a family dinner. Acting is someone 
else’s work, it’s going to change in the editing room. this is 
ours. They’re moments, they’re experience, they’re priceless. 
There’s this magical thing that’s happening right now with our art 
and our paintings. It’s a mirror to nature.

Ta- It’s sensation. It’s death, its happiness, its love, its 
disparity, all at the exact same moment.
T – You hear artists talk about this. We do a painting. All the joy, 
the bliss and fucking frustration, all that effort, is done once you 
put the brush down. Then it’s freedom, it’s there. I did it. Maybe 
it’ll burn but the joy of it is that it’s there. As an artist, I 
hope that this piece of art moves someone so much that they want it on 
their wall.
D- I believe in magic

Ta- What would you say magic is to you?
D- Magic is a chain of accidents and coincidences that become 
something tangible. We get together and create magic.
T- That book, ‘Many lives, many masters,’ says something like, 
‘everything is a message.’ Birds in the sky, bombs falling, people 
dying. Everything is a message, a mirror, to show us ourselves. When I 
was painting this baby it got real heavy, I started to cry. I started 
thinking of the real child in this picture I was looking at, the guts 
hanging out of its side, the skull flayed open. When I hear about 
people murder and unconsciously harming others, it’s a mirror. I know 
the pain. I relate to the anger, I get them, I relate to them. I can 
be judgmental at times, it’s an ugly trait I’ve been fucked by 
society and people. But there’s also this immense magical universe 
that conspires to make things happen. I believe in energy, I believe 
in the universe. It’s a candy store and I get to choose what I want 
to dip into. I am free to do what I want to do. And there’s a direct 
response from the universe. I was in Japan; I was walking with my 
pregnant wife. There’s this little old lady coming towards us down 
this narrow street and I’m in a rush, I’m frustrated and I step out 
into the street. I’m hit by a bus, knocked out of my wife’s hand, 
and sent flying 15 feet. I get up and start yelling. But then I took a 
second and realized what was really going on, that it wasn’t the lady 
or the bus, but rather it was me. I learned to take that second to 
look, to learn to really slow down and pay attention. We all have to 
take a step back and look at life, see it.

Ta- Putting yourselves through such a process riddled with sensations 
both good and uncomfortable while pushing the edges, the limits; how 
do these movements affect somebody? How do you intend for them to 
affect us?
T- I want it to give us all permission. If anything, I want it to show 
people that if these knuckleheads [us] could do it, so can you. Good 
luck too. If anything, be a doer, have a goal everyday and work 
towards those goals.
D- …And being unique. A lot of people don’t have their own voice, 
and we’re these two guys with our own voice, collaborating and making 
this unique voice.
T - Especially kids these days. We have our family, our town, our 
society, and kids are being pounded with information these days. Their 
brains are like little networks, I can’t imagine how they think. And 
this permission is educating. We’re all here to learn, forever. And I 
can split off and take whatever idea I have and create. It’s a big 
lesson and a good lesson, to share yourself 100%, let that inspire 
other people, be excited that its inspiring other people and don’t be 
afraid that people aren’t going to like you.

Ta- To simply let go.
T- Yes. The key is permission. I’m a free human being, and if I’m 
not free, I’m living like this. Its so simple, but we don’t know 
that, we don’t know that it’s that easy to simply let go of 
ourselves. I did the Belvedere vodka photo shoot with Terry 
[Richardson] and he’s like, get naked. I’m in a restaurant and next 
thing I’m naked in this restaurant pouring vodka on me. And my mind 
is saying yeah its fun, but is my dick small? We’re born naked, its 
how we are. It’s unnatural to be worrying about my length. But when 
you just do it, it’s in front of everyone. It’s right there, it’s 
permission. Next thing you know there’s 10 people naked too.
23 years down the line of time, the unborn audience: What 
understanding would you hope for them to gain from your creations?
D- That love slays the darkness.
T- I like that. It’s true. The essence, when it’s boiled down, life 
is about teaching and learning. When someone looks at this in 23 
years, someone might look at these and wonder if there’s anything 
political or social going on. But it’s in the permission you give 
yourself to be free, to create. You look at the artwork and say, I can 
do this. I think about this entire conversation, you get permission, 
you get permission to have a goal, and then to work towards it with a 
focus, you can go off but you can get back on, that’s part of the 
permission to be free. But to be on that journey and keep going.

Ta- Your art tells a story, the story of that journey, of your lives, 
here, today. There’s been a few paradigms in art that are only part 
of the story, part of the evolution of what you’re telling, what 
you’re creating. What would you say that story is?
D- my first thought is that, I want to walk in the light. I’ve walked 
in darkness for so long, a junkie, a liar, a thief. And now its 
important for me that I walk in the light, fuck the darkness, I’ve 
been there, its in my closet, I don’t want to live there.
T- I’ve talked about it concerning art. It’s an extension of the 
idea of not needing other artists to be inspired. The fact other 
artists are doing, if I like the outcome or not doesn’t matter, the 
fact they did it is what matters. I believe, what I want to believe, 
is that I’m a recorder in my time, today. If someone asked what my 
art was about, I want it to say, ‘this is my experience, here, today, 
in 2009.’ I’m not reaching back, other artists had their time. 
Artists like Da Vinci, they were recording what was going on in their 
lives, then. It’s transformation. I’m going to listen to metal and 
skate and paint until I’m 90. I want to do until I drop dead. My last 
expression, hopefully, will be me taking a picture of myself on my 
deathbed, the ultimate self-portrait.

Ta- At this point in time everything is possible. Everything is 
potential. How do you go about capturing a moment? Transforming the 
potential into the actual?
D- There are times where I won’t paint for months and times when 
I’ll finish 5 [paintings] in a week. Now it’s more disciplined 
working together. Capturing is about not thinking about it, being in 
it, in the present moment and not so much in your head.
T- That’s when it can get to be annoying. In the action of doing 
this, people react quickly. We did this bunny painting and people 
suggested we do a series of them. Suddenly we’re influenced and I’m 
trying to tell him how to make these bunny paintings. But what I try 
to do is close my eyes and see something. Confront what’s in front of 
me and not let my thoughts get in the way. And I have fuck-all 
technique, the process of the autodidacticism is rough, he’s seen me 
get frustrated.
D- But he can paint shit that I can’t even imagine. It’s awesome!

Ta- Through your collaboration and the shared relationship, creativity 
has taken everything to a place where ego has all but vanished. How 
would you like to take things to another level?
T- To really start to deface one another’s work. Because honestly,  
it’d really hurt. I’m really detailed and anal and to think about 
working on something for a while and then just watching Danny splatter 
over it would hurt for a second, but then it’d settle in and we’d 
feel it and it’d be okay. I think that would be an interesting 
process to explore. I appreciate what a lot of artists are doing, I 
like it, but I’ve never really seen anything like what we’re doing. 
It doesn’t make it better or worse than anyone else’s [art] but 
I’m grateful. It makes me feel easier to know that we’re doing 
something, to know we’re doing this.
D- We like what each other is doing, we’re pretty good at that, at 
liking each other’s stuff. It’s magic.

Tony Ward tells all!