Whether developing his own images or directing artists through the production of lithographs, etchings, and monoprints, Rick Dula demonstrates a remarkable degree of technical proficiency as well as a willingness to take risks and experiment. Granting the greatest degree of importance to the slightest details, Dula often combines skill with spontaneity and humor. In Dula’s own paintings and prints, the accumulation of details endows his works with a sense of time’s passing. Dula chooses common subjects: a paved street with the white arrow of a turn lane, a road cut by railroad tracks, a weatherbeaten billboard whose peeling layers form a palimpsest of outdated images and text. By observing and rendering each minute aspect of these scenes, Dula captures the wear of human and natural effects on the urban environment. His foregrounding of the abstract elements which govern the street landscape, like giant arrows or small, repeated patterns of cement blocks, hint at the artificial and often absurd nature of quotidian existence. However, by incorporating additional temporal components such as a straying golden retriever or the glimmer of golden aftenoon light on a ramshackle fence, Dula steers clear of cynicism and irony, achieving instead a delicate poignancy and psychological resonance.
Dula was master printer at Magnolia Editions for nearly twenty years, providing the expertise necessary to produce lithographs, etchings, and mixed-media pieces. He worked on a wide variety of projects with artists including Richard Shaw, William Wiley, Bob Hudson, John Register, Gus Heinze, Robert Arneson, Guy Diehl, George Miyasaki, Dan McCleary and Joan Brown.
