Richard Tinkler is a Brooklyn-based painter and illustrator.

I visited his studio in Bushwick to sit down and have a quick conversation with him about what brought him to the city, his artistic style, and health hardships he has dealt with as of recently.

Are these all your drawing books? There’s so many.
Yeah. Years and years of drawings. I kind of arrange them into groupings. It's kind of like a big project, an ongoing project, but it's interesting to talk about it from a perspective of getting people interested in your work and projects that you're working on. It's really hard when you're starting out. People aren't really that interested in drawings, and the idea that you're working on an epic book of drawings is not something anyone's ever heard of before. I mean, it's not that different from a graphic novel or something. It is just totally abstract. But anyway, it's something I'm still working on. There's thousands of drawings there.

So where are you from originally, and how did you end up here in Bushwick?

I was born in Maryland. Then when I was nine, my family moved to Dallas, Texas. So I grew up in Texas and I wasn't into art as a kid. I wasn't really that good at anything, you know? I didn't really fit in. I didn't see where I fit in. I was a really awkward, shy, weird kid. Then, I graduated high school and I went to community college. At community college, I started making some friends around that time, and some of them were artists. I was like, oh, this is kind of interesting. They would sit around, get high and paint with glitter paint.  Then, some of my friends were going to the University of North Texas, which was close by. So, I transferred there, and I'm taking out student loans to pay for my housing. I was like, “I want to take something really easy. I'm going to take this watercolor class.”  I loved it. Afterwards, I just changed my major to art. I really came to it through painting, not drawings or anything else. I made paintings, and a lot of the paintings I made in the beginning were really messy, with lots of found objects stuck to them and like lots of stuff from the dollar store and the thrift store. My plan was to move to New York because at the time being gay you could get fired for no reason. People could deny you apartments. I thought I should just move somewhere where I’m going to blend in. I moved here and got into the Masters of Art program at Hunter College to study painting. This and the job really helped me meet people in the city. Following graduation and when I started showing my work was about 15 years, so in those years I drew a lot. I also worked a day job at an art gallery for a number of those years.



Through this process, would you say you eventually discovered your own style when it comes to painting/drawing?

I started out making medium size paintings. It was big enough that there was something to see. You stood out, but it was small enough that I could take it on the subway with me. I could kind of do it on my own. I found that the more things you hold the same, the easier it is for people to see the differences. You get people to focus on what you want them to focus on. So making the paintings the same size, using the same size brushes. I try to hold a lot of things constant. I have spent ten years making this medium size painting. Then, the other is the bigger size. I started making that in 2021. And that's when interestingly people were a lot more interested in my painting. In retrospect, people think the smaller size is not that serious. However, when they started to see the larger size, they were like, ‘Oh, this is serious’. Then, sometimes I would create a string of paintings or two paintings together to form a sort of diptych piece. It is how I discovered potential in these limited sizes. Sometimes the biggest things about art, like subject matter, style, originality; they kind of take care of themselves. You may worry about them, but you don't really need to. You can't do anything but make your own work. You just have to kind of be true. If something feels or looks right to you, you just do that and follow where it goes.



Could we look at some of these drawings?

Yeah sure. You can look at it. You can just pull one. Sometimes I rework some of the drawings or I rearrange them. Some of them are made with colored pencils and some are ballpoint pens. This one is a colored pencil and most of them are. They started out with only ballpoint pens, but they are very unstable. If it gets exposed to light, it can fade like in weeks. These are actually made with Japanese micron pens. 

The style is so captivating. Is this just how your brain sees the finished result?
I use rulers, but the vast majority of them I'm not measuring. It's not actually symmetrical. I just put a dot in where I think the middle is. I do use a straight edge so that I can get the lines really close together, because otherwise they'd be kind of wobbly and they'd be further apart. I don’t really think about it in a mathematical way, although it may look as such. I think about it as a feeling. It just felt right to make these super detailed. There's something about that amount of attention applied to the surface that is very satisfying. These tend to take weeks and weeks and weeks to complete, which is funny because I make the paintings so fast. Some paintings may only take me an hour to complete. These drawings have a different feel. I can leave them and come back to them. I tend to work on the drawings every day when I wake up in the morning. I work for a couple hours and then do whatever I need to do. It is a continuing practice. They're both kind of equal in my work. It's not like one is like planning for the other. They have different kinds of strengths, but people tend to see the drawings as supportive. You can't. It's hard to avoid that. I don't think of them that way. My goal is to start to get each one of these books published as collections.



How is it working on a painting or a drawing while also going through chemotherapy?
Well the thing is, I've been going into this for a while. This is my third round of chemo and also I am recovering from surgery. There's different medical situations that I find myself in. When you're recovering from surgery you can't lift anything over like 5 pounds. What I've discovered as I've gone through this is that it actually doesn't make any sense to stop working during chemo because when I start up again afterwards. I feel lost. It takes me forever to get back into it. It's better to just keep working through it. It's actually really pleasant. Unfortunately, it's something that happens to so many people, which is part of the reason that I felt like I needed to be more open about it because there's a lot of negative stigma attached to it. I felt like because I was in it, especially since I don’t have a job and just work for myself, I was really in a position where I felt like I could be open about it. I think it's good for people to know that just because you're sick doesn't mean it's over. You can still do stuff. The vast majority of people that have cancer have good outcomes. If you don't say anything about that, then people just hear about the people who died. I think that makes it worse. It makes the whole situation more scary. In a way, it helps me not focus on it too much. It is kind of counterintuitive, but by sharing it, it's out of you. 

Has it influenced your work at all?

I feel like it influences the work but it's not a direct influence. The work is peaceful. It's just what it is. It's kind of its own thing. It kind of transcends that, which I think is helpful for me. I've been happy. I've been thankful to have my artistic practice. It's been really a comfort. It's really helped me a lot through this whole thing. I mean, it's part of life. Everybody goes through a lot. Your body falls apart. One thing that I've been thankful for doing all this, that I've been thinking about a lot is that of your brain chemistry and how you can't really control that, you know? I am thankful my brain has allowed me to keep going and stay optimistic.  


Richard has a solo exhibition of his drawings opening at 56 Henry Gallery this Friday, November 1st from 6pm-8pm. 


Information for that show here.
Richard’s Instagram can be found here.