BLACK BOOK INTERVIEW SEPTEMBER 2009

Daniel Louis Rivas and Tony Ward make really awesome art together when they're not modeling in music videos or acting in really rad alternative film fare. On the heels of their recent NYC gallery premiere, cover of TrendyTokion Magazine, and posting for the straight issue of Butt Magazine, I asked the boys a couple of questions and you'll see I got the expected, colorful results. What I like about them and their art is its complete lack of bullshit. Everything they do is off the cuff and correctly casual.

How did you and Tony come to collaborate together?
We’ve know each other for eight or so years, and we started hanging out everyday a couple years ago, Brain storming for hours in my small Valley Village cardboard box. And one thing lead to the next, and we started co-producing and starring in a feature film together called One Lucky S.O.B. that’s going to be directed by Betty Kaplan...It’s loosely based on some of my experiences when I first moved to Los Angeles. As you know, producing a dark independent feature film in Hollywood is a grueling process. It’s never ending. Everyone hates you and no one invites you to Thanksgiving dinner until after it’s in the can. As we;re waiting for that to be greenlit, we started investigating the possibility of having a show of my paintings and Tony’s photo’s at Ghetto Gloss gallery in L.A. That led to collaborating on the same canvass and leaving the ego in the closet so to speak.

What is the inspiration behind your work?
Life, death, sex, re-birth and the meaning of why we are here. What we feel and what we think and the juxtapose of that combined on one work or art. Living lives with many masks on. The art brings us back to being flesh and bone.
one foot in the grave and one flying angry fist in the hope of living forever in truth. The hilarity of heartbreak. Tradition, Family, heritage and the DNA of our ancestors that lives in all of us. My sister inspires me. Tony inspires me. Gerard Rudolf inspires me. The great American dream inspires me. When life gives you lemons, you paint that shit gold. Not being an underdog, but an archetype. Shakespeare!

What do you like art wise?
Francis Bacon, The Thundercats, Early French Graffiti. Caveman art. Herman Brood, Diego Rivera, Marlon Brando...(even though Tony told him that he was a fat ass and he couldn’t hurt him). Oscar the Grouch. Shakespeare!

Does anything else come into play? Like music, fashion, street art, etc?
Everything influences me and nothing influences me. I am a an old dusty am radio looking for a channel that’s not fucking static y. Quieting heroin influenced me. Being able to express my feeling and inspiring others to do so inspire me. Being in the moment. Music inspires me most of all..From The Carpenters to Black Flag. Bob Dylan to The Ghetto Boyz. I like Levis Jeans & Calvin Klein underwear. Shakespeare!

Tell me about how your acting and modeling has influenced you, if at all and how do you balance all these things so well?
I have a lot of time on my hands...No: none of that really influences my painting..I was was just tired of eating Top Ramon with Ketchup. I needed another gimmick. I can’t even balance my checkbook.Acting is in my blood and painting is my groin. I have no choice but to listen to what my body tells me. I hope Hollywood catches up. I find Hollywood very racist and close minded. I’m lucky if I get a job where I don’t play a Mexican Junkie pimp male hustler doorman serial killer gang member. Come on, Steven Spielberg, I am also a Jew from the upper east side of New York! There are some amazing open minded people that hire me here that can see past my last name..But those movies are usually low budget. And I continue eating Top Ramen.

What is coming up in the future for you are wise, acting-wise?
Tony & I are developing a TV show on our art and our relationship. It’s going to be sort of reality and semi-scripted. “Jackass”, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” meets fine art...But better. We have been currently filming that in LA and New York. It’s being pitched to the networks in September.

What do you do in your down time or are you always working and creating?
I always work and create and think of new hustles. Even in my dreams. I don’t know how to have down time in my mind. I can’t live like them. What is down time? Getting drunk at a lame Hollywood night club and banging a million of chicks with daddy issues, give me a break. Only bored people are boring. I am just reacting. Blow anybody?

FILLER: brand-new online fashion magazine!

Just published: the new FILLER, edition no. one, Sept 2009

While Tony Ward and Daniel Louis Rivas were waiting for their independent film, One Lucky S.O.B., to get green lit, they started investigating other creative avenues. Daniel, a painter for many years, knew Tony had been keenly involved in art and photography, so he arranged for them to have a show. “We just decided that we have a good time hanging and laughing and contriving the next fiasco,” says Tony. “It only seemed right that we stop wasting precious seconds of our lives and make some paintings, make some money, make some new friends, and live fucking life like true artists … loudly!” Herewith is an artistic conversation of loud proportions:   How has the experience of painting helped you make any sense of life?

DANIEL: I try and stay in the moment. It’s the connection in all things living & non-living that makes up the vaults in our mind. You don’t want to hold on to the perfect moment forever. It’s letting it go that gives this its real value. We are just documenting the experience of existence. We were here, trust me.

TONY: Doing these paintings is like a swift kick in the balls that sucks your breath away. I am a mad person when I paint, when I create. I want to shove my cock into LIFE and fuck the daylights out of it and serve it up on a tray for the world to gaze upon! Uhh, okay. What were the challenges of collaborating on this project and sharing a single canvas? DANIEL: No unique minds are similar. The more we disagree and see each other’s point of view, the longer we can maintain our creativity together. The harder it, is the longer we can sustain the freshness of the always-changing world.

 

TONY: Danny is faster than me at doing his thing. I am much slower and have to meditate and find the images in my mind, and then I am so damn anal about my technical and how I will achieve a specific image in my mind onto the canvas. I was never schooled for painting so every time I step to the canvas I am giving myself a great challenge, like realistic cadaver parts, reptiles, or, of late, a giant Dodo bird. DANIEL: Painting on a canvas is a moment and passing feeling that you have to act on, or it forever vanishes. I am an action painter. TONY: We are two totally different humans. He uses mainly one brush, his favourite, I need many, and have lots, and I am always complaining I need more. He jerks off fast, I jerk it slowly, methodically. He attacks the canvas, I stare at it, stare it down hard! You got to paint over one another’s work. How did you handle the emotions? DANIEL: That’s when the ego has to take a backseat to creation and revelation. At first, it was frustrating, but I’ve learned to accept and trust this experiment of ours will reveal more truth in the end. I pace a lot when it’s Tony’s turn at the canvas, or I take a nap, and hold my breath and pray for the best. TONY: I got over it, especially because it’s mostly me doing the over-painting and him pacing around behind me. Now, I just don’t give a shit. I think it shifted to “what-the-fuck-ever!” when Danny varnished over one of the paintings I particularly loved with a dirty brush and fucked the motherfucking painting up. That has become a part of the art now. DANIEL: Sometimes it’s like birth or rebirth, and sometimes it’s like going to the dentist. But having the dentist be a really rad, hot chick with double D’s and thick extraterrestrial lips.

You definitely have some distinct approaches to the canvas. DANIEL: I am trying to shed the lizard skin and become the man I was meant to be, putting the pain back in painting. TONY: Everything kind of disappears when I paint—just a brush, colour, and sweat dripping down my forehead into my eyes. I want to believe I can do anything; as a matter of fact, I know there is nothing creative that I cannot do. I just have to wrap my mind around it and step to it! Is the collaboration why your paintings often explore the notion of identity? TONY: Identity is liquid, gaseous, vapour trails, it’s perfect like that. Like a smelly wet fart! If I am trying to say anything in my art, it’s STOP with the identity thing, it’s killing you! I don’t self ID, I think it is crippling and self hatred. I LOVE MY QUANTUM REALITY! Are the masks in your paintings another form of identity? DANIEL: The masks represent our transitions from what the world labels us to what we really are at the core. What you think of me is not really what I am. Are feelings facts or fleeting ego? I’ve always been obsessed with masks from every region & time period. Aztec masks, African masks. The everyday masks we wear to get through this experience. The world is trying to kill us. The cigarette companies, the alcohol companies, the fast food companies. Where do we draw the line and just be us in a world of ignorance? Is the mask permanently glued on our faces? That’s why we titled a painting, and called our last New York show, “Is That Your Real Meat Face?” TONY: Everybody mentions masks. They are not masks! I reveal what is under masks!!! How has this project unmasked the relationship between the two of you? DANIEL: It has made us more in tune with what the other is going through at the present moment. Being an artist, actor, model, hooker, waitress, it’s all time. Tony and I are hustling and trying to have fun, feed our families, staying one step ahead of the landlord and the law and surviving the best we can. Moonlighting is a part of the hustling game, do you consider yourselves more artists now than actors or models? DANIEL: I think any good, interesting actor is an artist and writer regardless. When you hire me for your movie or your TV show, you get a perspective, a point of view. I live my life with a box of colours that I drag from mystery to mystery. I’ve never been straight off the bus from the mid-west. I am not an L.A. fuck doll. TONY: Fuck all that model and actor bullshit!!! It’s a monkey’s job, and it’s getting to be just as glamorous as working at Der Wienerschnitzel. I was born an artist, I just had to give myself permission to go for it. I have lots to do while I’m still sucking air, and I’d like to leave some hot form of legacy for my children. I look at living life as an art form— it’s not just the obvious, “Hey this is my art thingy!” I am an artist in every minute of my existence. I could be painting, making clothes, gardening, cooking, acting, sexing, taking a crap, whatever. I am an artist. A crap, huh? Well, speaking more figuratively, what does the creative process drives out of you? DANIEL: The hilarity of heartbreak. Travelling around the world making movies. In love, in hate, awake or asleep. With money and without money. How come I’ve always been so fucking weird? Figuring out what I am going to do with the rest of my life. The demons! The hope and the regret. TONY: Vomitous layers of gut, bile and plaque! I believe in the exorcism of the creative process, especially while painting. I’ve gotten so worked up I have cried while painting, jerked off—not on my painting—sang, laughed … Really, the best is the shit it drives out of my head!!! Once it’s all driven out and it’s there on the canvas, what do you see as being beautiful in both your art and art in genreral? DANIEL: I think beauty is a feeling. I find beauty in the action of the moments, movements, and the attack on the canvas. Have you ever been punched really hard in the face? The first thing you see is what’s most absurdly beautiful. TONY: Beauty is when someone is screaming their feelings out in the art. I just know beauty when I feel it! Last question, what do you hope your audience takes away from viewing your collection? TONY: I hope it inspires you all to speak, loudly, your mind. Whenever, wherever, and to stir up the muck!!! PEACE, YOU HOT FUCKERS!!!   www.Fillermagazine.com

BUTT out!

This is from the latest edition of BUTT magazine, The Straight Issue. Photography by Robin Black, Paintings by Mr. Ward and Daniel Louis Rivas.
Interesting interview inside, you betta run to your local gay magazine supplier to get your own copy!

get BUTT here