Creageivity
If you think you may be too old to be creative, or too creative to be old, then CREAGEIVITY is the podcast for you. Hosted by artist / musician / writers Adrienne Thomas and Harlan Cockburn, each show brings illuminating and inspiring conversation with people who have kept on keeping on in their chosen field... or started some entirely new activity in later life.
Creageivity
Creageivity 37 - with Artist Ramon Kubicek
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Artist RAMON KUBICEK speaks to us from his home in Gibsons, Canada, where he is a prolific painter and writer. He describes how he has always worked at whatever comes his way in order to continue as an artist. Day jobs have included running wine tasting sessions and construction work. Throughout, he has created, and in recent years has also become interested in how art and healing can be merged, but with his own very specific viewpoint. Indeed his views on what makes art and artists are very carefully considered.
As he remarks of earlier years, 'My life was hard but filled with wonder.' That sense of wonder continues with his current paintings combining myth, magic, and a vivid use of colour, often with vivid and poetic titles.
Examples of the artwork - and writings - can be viewed on Ramon's website at: www.ramonkubicekart.com
and on instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/ramonkubicek/
For a conversation about masterful painting and a life lived in art, tune in to Creageivity 37!
Music is 'Salmon Ladder / Resting Pool' from good friend of Creageivity, OLD MAN THOMPSON: https://souterrainsounds.bandcamp.com/
If you feel you're too old to be creative, or too creative to be old, then Creageivity is the podcast for you!
This is the Creativity Podcast, Episode Thirty Seven.
SPEAKER_04If you think you're too old to be creative or too creative to be old, then Creativity is the podcast for you. And this week we're very, very excited indeed to welcome the artist Ramon Kubicek. Whose work I think both Haaland and I have been following and admiring for years. Yes. His work as an artist. But as we'll find out, there's a heck of a lot more to his life and work than that. And he did describe his own background as a maze. So we're going to enter the maze of Ramon Kubicek.
SPEAKER_03Before that, Adrienne, say hello.
SPEAKER_04Hello. I'm speaking from Brighton on the southeast coast of England. Haaland is in Budapest in Hungary.
SPEAKER_01And Ramon is in Gibsons, British Columbia, by the sea.
SPEAKER_03Oh, lovely. So you're on the west coast of Canada.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely, yes. Like up until two or three years ago, I was going back and forth from Montreal because that's where I'm originally from, and I love Montreal, except that it's so far away from here. You know, I love the forest and the sea and all the natural elements. But at the same time, I love the fact that I can walk down the street in certain areas of Montreal and people call me over and I engage and I meet people from all over the world. Are you in a small town? Gibson's is a small town. That's right. Even people who have grown up in Vancouver think that Gibson's is on an island. I said, no, no, no, it's not. It's part of the mainland, but there's a strait that's quite wide and it cuts right through. So you can't drive to Gibson's. You have to take a ferry, which is a 40-minute ride. And so Gibson's is about uh 12,000 people. And there's one highway that goes north from Gibson's through Seasheld. It ends up at Earl's Cove, and then you take another ferry. And so then you've maybe on the map driven up two inches of this otherwise rugged coastline. And it's the only highway that goes north along the coast. It's it had a strange history. So the government wanted people to move here, so they had ferries running every hour. So people then commuted. They came here, they rented, they bought. This was you know maybe 30 years ago. And then as soon as they settled in, the government canceled a lot of the ferries. But that makes it difficult for a lot of people.
SPEAKER_03I'd like to plunge in at first through your paintings, which I get very excited whenever I see a new painting posted. Can you tell us about what gets you going? Why do you do them? What do they look like even?
SPEAKER_01Well, I can paint in a number of different ways. I've done highly realistic, almost photographic realism painting, but I gave up on that because it took too much out of me and it takes too long. And I tend to be impatient. So I've opted to stick with what you might call an expressionist style, which has some realistic elements in it, but it's mostly color-based. And I have a kind of intense use of color. Yeah. Most of them are based on some concept or idea that I have combined with a spiritual focus. So, for example, my most recent painting that I posted this week was called Murmuration of Souls. The idea of murmuration is itself an awesome concept, birds flying in the sky and creating these extraordinary spectacles. And I just thought, well, imagine if that were our souls. So I found a way of uh, although it may not have come through exactly in a photograph of depicting that, I used silver paint and gold paint so that that would stand out a lot more against the blue background. And um, that was it. It was very simple. But the way I thought of it, this is where the concept comes in. I thought of it as the first of a number of different endeavors in that regard, so that I want to do also not necessarily paintings, but installation pieces that would include image, sound, all on the idea of murmuration of souls.
SPEAKER_04I just was particularly moved by that title this time because here in Brighton we do have a murmuration every single evening at dusk of starlings. I really loved the idea that they represent souls. And there is the myth, isn't it, that seagull's cry is the cry of a dead sailor. Wow. So the magic of all that interfacing in that painting was just wonderful.
SPEAKER_01Oh, thank you. That's good. That's what I look for. I look to try to inspire people in some way. And I I layer a lot of different things into a painting. My expectation is not that the viewer will see all of them, but that the viewer was fed by something. So I always try to make it at least visually interesting for the viewer, even if they don't receive all the different references. I say, well, maybe another day they will.
SPEAKER_03You were mentioning titles like The Murmuration of Souls. One of my favorite titles of your paintings is As We Carry On Each Day, lead slowly turns to gold. That's a piece of poetry in itself.
SPEAKER_01Again, I really do believe that. That's my personal philosophy. Life is difficult, but if if we go through life with the right attitude and with help, we can improve and we can help others to improve. But whatever karma we carry, whatever flaws we have, that's the lead. Yes. Let the lead enter into gold, you know. So that's my sense.
SPEAKER_03About your paintings, it looks like you work on the texture of the paint a lot. And I would imagine that you're doing two things at the same time. One is being open to accident, and at the other end of the scale, really manipulating paint and really working almost sculpturally with the paint. Is that ridiculous to assume these things?
SPEAKER_01Or no, no, it's not. In fact, that's the kind of sane and healthy way of thinking about it. I don't know if I can live up to that. Sometimes I do. So it depends. A lot of people who work in what's called the abstract way will just start with the surface and see what comes. And then and exactly as you've said, they'll work with the pigments and move them and so forth. So, yes, and I'm all for that building up texture. I start with an idea of something, and I'm not quite sure what that will become. And often it doesn't become that at all. So, for example, I had an idea for a painting called Back to Galapagos. So I had this thing in my mind where I could see some of the animals on rafts. Say, forget it, we're going by. Okay, yes. Anyway, it didn't work out. You know, I was starting it and uh I said, this looks silly. It looks like a, you know, a bad cartoon of some kind. So halfway through it, it just became something else completely abstract. And what you could see through the abstracted elements of the painting were some images of animals. Or you might you might think that you saw them because I didn't bother to completely eliminate them. And so the painting becomes something else. So, yes, I don't know, maybe 25 or 30 percent of my paintings are based on discoveries that I have made while I've been painting. Yes. And as I say, oh, I didn't think of that. Thank you. I say to the canvas. Yeah. In many ways, I have a kind of silly relationship with my work. I'm sitting in my living room right now. I live alone. So that's why I can get away with the fact that I have about 15 or 20 paintings stacked against the wall. But I also have a studio where I work, and that's crammed with paintings too. So sometimes out of pure laziness, I end up working just at home, trying to be very careful not to spill paint. And so I don't get to the um studio. And when I do, I feel like I have to apologize to the paintings there. I still love you. I know I haven't been here in two weeks, but I still love you. Yeah, yeah, you see that now. Right. The silliness aside, there's a kind of living relationship with my paintings, and so I can feel what they want to become sometimes.
SPEAKER_03There's often figurative elements in your paintings.
SPEAKER_01Yes, absolutely, because I think that's what I want to do is combine a few different stories. You know, it's always layered with different narratives. And sometimes the titles are clues to that. For instance, one idea I was exploring was the idea of Ariadne, the um princess, and I guess in some way, the um Amagus daughter of King Linos in ancient Crete, who helped Theseus with her magic ball of wool enter the labyrinth and survive the encounter with the minotaur. But she is, in my mind, it's quite an extraordinary figure. I did quite a bit of studies and classics, and she was quite an extraordinary figure. So she's not just, oh, a helpless female, but she was someone who knew magic. She was a princess in her own right. But at the same time, she was constrained by the rules that favored men. So when Theseus afterwards rescued her and then abandoned her, and she was left on the island of Naxos, the god Dionysus, I guess, saved her if you want to call it that, but it was it was more than that. So she became, she began to be treated as something more than that. In fact, when she died, Dionysus threw her into the heavens and she became a constellation of stars. And a lot of the contemporary thinking about her is that she represented a way of thinking and that was very ancient, that was based on shamanic female power and so forth. So I was very interested in all this. So I have a series of paintings, in part an exploration of geometry, which is connected to a floor mosaic, but then you see the figure of Ariadne, and she's trailing, you know, a thread and so forth, walking through it. Where is she leading us? A number of different ways I explore such ideas. I don't ask that the viewers know all this, but is there anything there that pleases them? Is there anything there that they want to find out for themselves? That's it. I have a whole series of paintings on a number of different themes. For instance, another one that's a popular one for me is an exploration of the mesopelagic zone, which is you probably know, is that zone of the ocean whose depth is about 500 to 1,000 meters. So what lives there? Certain octopi and sperm whales and various other things, and also hideous-looking fish and all kinds of things. It fascinates me. And also for me, it's a stand-in for the collective unconscious. Yeah. And so, in a similar way, we're not sure what is in our collective unconscious. So I explore those.
SPEAKER_03Well, mesopelagic zone, Adrienne, you want to talk about water?
SPEAKER_04I was just going to say I've I've spotted uh something about your interest in art and healing, concentrating on water. So I wonder if you'd be willing to expand on that a little bit.
SPEAKER_01Of course, I'm interested in water. Um, I choose to live by the ocean. Art and healing is a very wide concept. Normally, I think most people, when they think of art and healing, I think of if they are suffer from some medical condition that art can alleviate that. But the way I thought about it was to create art to heal others, not to heal oneself. Like in the process, one can be healed. So others can include the water. In these times, there's a new initiative which has been developed by something called the Parliament of Things, a concept that was started by the philosopher Bruno Latour. Now, the parliament of things, I love that idea, is a notion that everything has a right to exist. It's not just there for our pleasure. So the first test case was the North Sea. So the North Sea has been granted citizen rights. So that includes the water, living things, but also actual things that are associated with it, like fishing boats and fishing gear and all kinds of stuff like that. And so art projects are created that develop that notion. I find it quite exciting. Other people just scratch their heads. For me, art is not about self-expression. That is one form of it, but it's for me, it's the lowest form of it. You know, I feel sad, here's my sad painting. I feel happy, here's my happy painting. But if I'd like to take it a step farther in that I see other people are sad, let's explore that. What can we do about that? Can we create beauty out of that? To me, art is about connection in part. So if I connect with people through art, then I'm happy.
SPEAKER_04So are there specific artists or works of art that heal you in that sense that you really get some sense of being helped or healed or uplifted by?
SPEAKER_01I have so many different favorites. It depends what we're talking about, right? I love people who work in every kind of style. As far as healing art goes, it can be problematic. There was an artist who passed away recently that I knew called C.L. Bergman, an American artist. She was quite famous in the States and also worldwide, and sometimes when the Dalai Lama went to visit, some of his monks came, they stayed with her. So there was, she had a connection with all of that network. She had started life as an adult, as a psychiatric nurse. Then she decided, no, she wanted to return to her first love, which was painting and art. So she returned to university and did graduate work in painting. She was extraordinary because she combined artistic talent with a high, high degree of intelligence. I love being, you know, having conversations with her. We would talk about all kinds of things. Now the thing is, there was one famous painting where she had a show in Los Angeles at one of the galleries there. It was quite a large painting. And in the forefront was a six-foot iris flower in hot and botanical realism. The background was abstract, but suggestive of water almost and beautiful. Now that became the central painting for her exhibition. After the exhibition, the gallery said to her, You can't do that again. We're kicking you out. What? She was kicked out of the gallery and she left and went to the southwest. And she, you know, she her career rebounded. She decided she was going to follow her path, which was based on art and healing. So for her, the iris was symbolic, was combining different ideas. Beauty can be something that's superficial, meretricious, but it can also be a healing force. That's something I understand. Beauty as a healing force, not simply as decoration. And I can approach that from a number of different ways, either from just you see something that touches your soul, let's say, in nature, or it can even be intellectually when you think of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love, that was not a wall decoration. That was a force, a healing force, and very powerful. So then the question just becomes, how is it a healing? And so those are the sorts of ideas I was exploring. Now you've got to stop me when I start, because once I start, I'll I'll just go on and on and on.
SPEAKER_03That's the idea of an interview.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_03Let's take you back to your earlier life. Were you always an artist? Were you always a painter? Because it seems you were also involved in a lot of academic work, universities, and even a story of being a hundred foot up in the air, shifting steel girders in Bristol, England. Walking on steel girders. I was shifting. Okay.
SPEAKER_01Yes. A lot of it was dictated by circumstances. I've always tried to be quick on my feet, and that's why I said my life is a maze sometime. I couldn't send you my CV because it was trapped on the computer. So I wrote a quick narrative.
SPEAKER_03I really like the fact that you sent us a storyline that twisted in and out. Yeah. That's actually for me more interesting and revealing than simply went to school age 18 to 20 or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I had a I guess a difficult childhood, but I had always did things like drawing and fairy tales, and I was interested in all of that. And one of the reasons it was difficult was we were an immigrant family, and everyone in those days was an O'Connor or a Smith where we live. And they could check, what's that? And it's very funny because years later, when I went to visit my family, all that had changed. The exotics were then O'Connor and Smith. But while I was growing up, it was not that way. So I would seek solace. I loved fairy tales, loved illustrations and painting and so forth. By the age of 14, I decided that when I grew up, whatever that means, I still not grow up, I would become an artist or a writer or maybe filmmaker or something like that. I was determined, I'd already laid a plan for myself. And I'm a person who can be very, very focused.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_01I guess academically I was quite good. I went to a, I guess what you call a public school, but it was run by Jesuits and somehow I survived that. I was accepted to Princeton. No, my father said, well, I've done it because you didn't get a scholarship. So none of that. I'm not paying for that. So there was another working class university. It was right downtown. Because my father taught there business management, I got a free ride. I wasn't that narcissistic. I thought, yes, but think of the sacrifice I'm making as the student. You know, but it actually turned out, even from my selfish point of view, turned out well because it became a kind of hub of new developing creativity. The art department had some interesting artists there. And so that was developing. And as I mentioned, they they had a new film studies department. And out of that, the Montreal Film Festival developed. We also had some really interesting writers. So I was actually quite dizzy. I said, okay, I can do writing too. Because then I remember taking a sociology course, but almost never attending because I was always in the film studies program. Right.
SPEAKER_03Can I ask you to rewind very briefly? You said Kuba Czech, what's that? An immigrant family. From where? From where, yeah.
SPEAKER_01My father was Slovak and my mother was Czech. Right. Czechoslovakia, Czech and a Slovak. I was conceived in Italy, I could have been born there, but no, they rushed off so that I could be born in New Brunswick, which is not, it's you know, farm country. Uh it's um in Canada. Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_03I interrupted your flow, but I didn't want to lose that thing that you were saying your family were the odd ones at.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they were. When I was in class, we had like 25 to 30 children in the class, and there were three immigrant kids: Ernest Spinelli, Luigi Tanzini, and then there was me, Kubuchek. So I had to figure out how to survive all of that. I remember in the second grade or third grade, one of the Anglo kids invited me to his home for lunch. And I saw his mother, and she was blonde and blue-eyed, and I fell in love with her. Then we sat down for lunch, and she served up Campbell's cream of tomato soup, and I was in ecstasy. Campbell's cream of tomato soup, and then also white bread sandwiches with the edges cut off. Oh my God, all I had was rye bread at home. I thought, oh my God, I've gone to heaven.
SPEAKER_03So now we know where your fascination with Ariadne comes from. Based on this archetype that you met as a kid.
SPEAKER_00Except if she was Cretan. So she had some of that, yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah, you're right. You're right.
SPEAKER_03We went way off track there because I was asking you about your family background. We got as far as you being more interested in the film school than most anything else.
SPEAKER_01I was incredibly idealistic and naive. I remember going to uh Czechoslovakia, it was Czechoslovakia in those days, and saying, I'm going to go to the Prague Film School, which was one of the top film schools in the world. I felt like all I have to do is I'm here. And they would take me.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01They did not take me. But I was still doing art of various kinds, you know, mostly sketches and Drawings and doing a lot of writing. And there was a practical element to the writing too. There was still the expressive quality, but the fact is, writing didn't require anything except a pen and paper. Whereas visual art, you know, is messy and complicated. I went to university very young. I was 16. I graduated. So I rushed off to the Sahara. I'm going to the Sahara. You don't love me. I'm going to the Sahara. Okay. As you do. So it was the Moroccan Sahara, because I had a friend in Morocco in Agadir, but he wasn't there when I showed up. So I waited a week or two. And then I just went south until I got to the Sahara. And I was there for a few months. And some of the stuff I did was make installations in the desert and exploring certain ideas. And I was reading Uspensky's In Search of the Miraculous, filled with ideas of, wow, this is what I want. And I thought, I know where I must go. I must go to Egypt to see the Sphinx. I was going to go along the north of Africa until I reached Egypt. But even before I got out of Morocco, I was in Marrakesh and I stopped in a cafe. And there I met up with a person I'd originally gone to visit. So we had our connection. He said he was going to Spain.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_01And so I ended up going to Spain. And it was beautiful there. And then Portugal. We were in the Algarve. And I had my first spiritual experiences, I guess, born out of intense reading of Uspensky and all the elements, the ocean, the heat, and everything else. And then from there, Paris, and then went to England. And there I stayed for five years. This is your walking on Goethe's period. Yes. That's right. Well, I had to have some work. So everything was always a practical thing. We got to Bristol. We stayed in a bed and breakfast the first night. And I because we can't afford this. I've managed to find a bedsitter. I still can't afford even a bedsitter. I got to find work. So I went out onto the street and wandered around until there was a building site. They were looking for workers because, you know, I was a strapping fellow. They said, okay, you can work here. What the job was was just a common laborer. And they said, Well, what we want you to do is you need to carry stuff. And they just pointed up. I'd never done anything like that in my life. I did that for a few months. And I would come home. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and I'd scare myself because my hands were like claws because they had tent stock into this position from constantly gripping all day long. Somewhere along the line there, first was the Gurdjieff group, then I read Bennett's Witness. And there was a Subid group in Bristol where I was living. So I did that. And then I met Emmanuel Elliott. And he said, Are you interested in wine tastings? I said, Well, I'm interested in wine. So he says, Well, you can be a professional, sell wine through wine tasting. So based on one weekend's training, I became it's all the but I'm I've always been comfortable just taking on challenges and acting out in the public eye. So I said, Sure, I can do that. And that's what I did for a while. So many years later, when I was teaching at art school, one of my students said, Ramon, what's your philosophy of life? How do you create art? And just like that, I said, Well, the important ideas are love, poetry, and wine. And they looked at me, oh my God. But there's not just romantic love. It's poetry is, of course, what's on the page, but it's also the essence of life. You have to see the poetry in things. It's not something I want to explain. And if someone wants me to intellectualize it, I will walk a hundred miles the other way. It's the poetry of life. And wine is, of course, I like wine, but wine is also the willingness to engage in intoxication, the intoxication of life, the way the Sufis talk about it. So that to me is the essence. If you have those experiences, then the technical elements, and that's it. And if you're not, then if you're not an artist, I don't think. If you're just saying, well, I just want to get the likeness, right? Well it's more than that. It's more than getting the likeness. So when I started do the wine tastings, it was funny because I never tasted wine, never drank wine while I was giving the wine tasting. It was just other people that drank it. And that's how I carried on.
SPEAKER_03I wanted to join the dots between you're in North Africa reading Ospensky's In Search of the Miraculous. Ospensky was the companion of Gurdjieff. You've mentioned Subud, but there's a bit in the middle, isn't there, where you went to the Gurdjieff Institute in London.
SPEAKER_01It was not quite right that way. I went to the Uspensky to call it house because I didn't know there was a difference. And so I learned later, you know, met up with Bennett's work. So I was initiated into the meditation that the Uspensky people had at the moment, which was then taken from northern India, from the Shankara Sharia tradition. That was a bit bewildering for me. I said, what does this have to do with Ur Spensky or Gurdjieff? But that's where they were leading it. And only once I started to get into it, I realized, oh, there's a difference between the Uspensky work and the Gurjiev work. For me, the Gurjiev teaching was something that was non-negotiable. I just loved it completely. It made total sense to me. But of course, that was what I got from the reading. In practice, when I saw the people, you know, it was not always what one hoped for. You know, I'd see people walking around, you know, very tense and they're don't talk to me. I'm remembering myself.
SPEAKER_04Self-remembering, that was it, wasn't it? It drove me mad trying to do that.
SPEAKER_03Oh, have you tried it, Adrian?
SPEAKER_04I did try it, yes.
SPEAKER_03All right.
SPEAKER_04Tried to stop smoking by self-remembering. But it was too, it just went drilled into my brain.
SPEAKER_01So that that was a huge shift because I was gonna go off to the Middle East. But by then I was also married, which is ridiculous at 22 to be married, but that's another whole other story. So I was looking after someone, and so I thought, well, I can't just rush off to the Middle East. So I stayed and engaged in work and uh tried to do art, but it was difficult because you know I didn't have a studio, and I did other things, like for example, I don't know whether you've ever heard of Kay Facet, but he's famous for his knitting books and so forth.
SPEAKER_03Oh yes, yes, yes, yes.
SPEAKER_01There were a few of us, Kay Facet and Judy Britton and a few others. So we got this commission to work on giant wall hangings, yeah, and that's the kind of work we were able to do together. I was very interested in working with other people, and so we had come various commissions, like for instance, George Harrison, the Beatle, uh commissioned a piece from us and were able to sell, but we were a group of us doing these largely abstract wall hangings. So that's what I worked in, and sometimes had two or three jobs. And that's the thing about my life is that I've never had just one job. So it was difficult for me to uh develop an art career, but I you know I did, I was insistent that I do something like that. Then suddenly I we had to leave Britain because they said, Well, we've let you stay here for five years, but that's the limit. My wife Diana, she didn't want to go back to Montreal. So we landed in Vancouver. I just had$50 in my pocket. So somehow, again, using circumstances, I created something else. I said, Well, you know, I have to improve my credentials. I could still get a graduate degree in literature. Okay, sure, why not? So I applied and was accepted. And so that started. And then I ended up working import-export because the people who were running were impressed with how I handled one of the difficulties they had. And so they said, Would you like to be a director of this? I said, Well, okay, okay, I'll do that. So I an assistant teacher in the graduate program, and I was doing graduate work, and I was working for this enterprise. And then before I even graduated with a master's degree, I found out there was a teaching job at the local college here. So I applied for it and I got it. And that meant working with the art department and the design department and so forth. And so I was able to uh do that. I was doing some interesting things with them. And so as a result of that, Emily Carr University, they heard about it, so they called me in and said, Can you explain to us what you're doing? I said, Yeah, and I explained, and they said, Well, this is very interesting. Would you like to do it for us? I wasn't expecting that at all. So I said, Okay. I know it seems like very chaotic, but I guess what I'm doing is laying out a theme that is responding to circumstances and also the fact that teaching became a way for me of working with creative ideas. One of the things that was important to me was that art was not about self-expression, but about relationship, relating. And so you could do that also with teaching. As a result of that, I became involved in various other things, like that's the art and healing and various other things like that.
SPEAKER_04I'm very interested in your technique, Ramon, and the materials you use. I think you use oil sticks, don't you? Because your paintings are wonderfully luminous. Is it true that you do a painting every day?
SPEAKER_01It's impossible for me to do a painting every day. No. I work every day, but I don't do a painting every day, no. And sometimes when I'm busy doing other things, I'm working in my head. So I've I have an ability to keep that going. So sometimes the painting changes even before I've met the canvas. What happens is I use oil stick, which is sometimes called oil bar. It's composed of oil pigment. And so what happens is I lay down a base color, but I leave certain areas free if I want to put acrylic there, because as you obviously know acrylic and oil don't mix, they don't get along. But I can use afterwards when it dries, my oil stick to draw through it to create marks, and then put layers on it, depending on what it is that I'm working on. Sometimes I'll look at it and I say, God, that's dull. This is going to become something else. I'm going to push it, I'm going to push it in in another direction. And that might work or it might not work. So I've had paintings that I've done over, and what happens is that there's a painting there that I said, I'm sorry, you didn't work. But I'm going to put a painting over you, and you can still take some of the credit for it. I'm talking to the painting.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And so I do another painting, but allow some of that original painting to come through. So that creates sometimes some interesting effects. The only frustrating part with oils is that oils take so long to dry. So that's why I don't like to do sometimes. I'll do the whole canvas in oil, and then I put it to one side and I said, I'm I'm not talking to you now for two weeks. For me, color is really important.
SPEAKER_04Which I think is a very, very powerful element of all your work. It's the thing that impacts immediately, is the use of color and the depth of it. It looks brilliant anyway, whatever you do.
SPEAKER_03How important is it for people to view your painting, to view your art?
SPEAKER_01Oh, well, it is important. Um, but it's hard where I live. I've had some health challenges in the last three years. And so as a result, marketing went by the wayside, even to some extent, painting went by the wayside. So, for example, in 2024, I had four surgeries requiring general anesthetic. Wow. And so the general anesthetic was really beat me up. So I let it slip. In fact, I have a gallery in Montreal that represents me, and I have to try to mend the fences with them because otherwise I'm gonna what am I gonna do with all these paintings? So that's the next thing is to have an organized initiative, accommodation of pop-up gallery shows to getting a gallery out here in Vancouver. So it is important that people see my work, but I don't quite know how to arrange that.
SPEAKER_04So do you have a website, for instance?
SPEAKER_01Maybe I should uh if someone asks me the time, I should say it is, you know, whatever it is, uh 12 30. And here's my website. That's how it's done, apparently. It is, yeah. It's it's www.romankubacart.com.
SPEAKER_03Okay. We'll also include it on our website. Oh, thank you. Yeah. I think Adrienne asked how large are your paintings? You did ask that, didn't you?
SPEAKER_04I did. They look massive, but they're actually not.
SPEAKER_01Most of my paintings are 24 inches by 36 inches. Some are slightly bigger than that. I have worked smaller, but never usually smaller than 11 inches by 20 inches. That's usually the smallest that I get. Somehow it feels like when I try to do 11 by 20 or 12 by 20, that it feels like it wants to burst out. It wants to expand. It's a discipline I haven't quite got to yet. I have to deliberately choose more focused ideas that fit on a small space.
SPEAKER_04How important is it to you that people see the actual work? They would not be looking at photographs or prints of it. Well, except on your website, you wouldn't ever consider selling them as prints, for instance.
SPEAKER_01I haven't gone down that road yet as prints, but some people have asked me that because it's something else that I have to do and concentrate on and learn how to do it. So that's why. At the local cafe, there's ten of my paintings on their walls. And so people sometimes are there and they talk to me, where can I see your work? Yeah. And I say, Yeah, they're on the wall here. Oh, yes, I saw. Yeah it just speaks to the fact that our attention is just so invaded by so many things that people stop seeing.
SPEAKER_04Yes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_03We're coming to a close, but what's your message to people who are listening? This is called creativity. It's about creativity and age. Right. What can you tell our listeners?
SPEAKER_01Well, as long as you're living, breathing, and loving, you can keep on creating. That's it.
SPEAKER_04What a lovely note to end on. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01One of the my favorite stories is Picasso apparently on his last day, and he was in his 90s. He had dinner with his wife and a friend, then excused himself, went, did a little bit of painting, went to bed and died in his sleep. Way to go. That's how to do it. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, this felt like I was just starting to get going with this conversation. And now it's over.
SPEAKER_03Well, it's been a huge pleasure. Yeah, and thank you for your time. Thank you. And we hope to see a lot more of your paintings in a wider context. Yes. Okay. In the near future.
SPEAKER_01Well, go to my website and you'll see a lot of work there.
SPEAKER_03Yes. Hi, Adriano. Are you still there? I am indeed, and good. Ramon's gone, but I'm interested in what you think and what we learned from Ramon's chat.
SPEAKER_04I think the lesson for me was about being determined, just keeping on going, whatever the heck happens to you, to keep your dream and your goals in front of you and don't stop ever.
SPEAKER_03I was impressed that Ramon, like many creative people I know, does exactly that, working in whatever form he finds. So he was a construction guy, he was in import, export, and of course the wine tasting, all of which was slightly off theme, but they kept him going, they kept him creating.
SPEAKER_04And I'm sure most creatives out there will have a similar pattern. I certainly have. And you know, they felt like dead-end, horrible, dirty jobs at the time. But I find now that they fed into something. I don't quite know what it is. And you learn an awful lot about life, don't you? Working in a light bulb factory, for instance.
SPEAKER_03Did you work in a light bulb factory?
SPEAKER_04I did work in a light bulb factory, having the bulb sprayed orange. So, yeah, I think that variety of the maze that of his life that he described probably informs his work to quite a degree.
SPEAKER_03Yes. The love of nature and the love of place really comes through strongly with Ramon. It does.
SPEAKER_04And of course, he's in the perfect place for that because he's by the sea, isn't he?
SPEAKER_03Sounds rather gorgeous, yes. It does sound gorgeous. I've been a fan of Ramon's painting for quite a few years now. And it was so good to speak with him and to find out more about him. And also find out from his website that he's quite a prolific writer as well.
SPEAKER_04He is indeed. He's uh multi-talented, I suppose. He's the sort of work that I've obviously been seeing a lot of it on social media. Then I've built him up into this amazing person who I couldn't possibly approach or speak to. And he's quite the reverse, he's very easy and sort of humble in a way.
SPEAKER_03Very approachable. What interests me, and it's something that so many of our creative colleagues, friends, people that we've met on Creativity have going, is that they're fantastically creative. They're quite exceptional in many ways, and very often it's the marketing. Absolutely. It isn't happening, or it isn't happening as much as it really should, given how good they are.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I think that's true of absolutely everybody, but I can sell somebody else's work and ideas, but not my own.
SPEAKER_03This is the thing, we're pretty good at giving support to other people. Anyway, let's just go back to Ramon. Okay. Uh, because I thought it was a great interview. It was very interesting, very, very stimulating, and I really hope people will go to his website and look out for what he does and how he does it.
SPEAKER_04You have to see it because it is really exceptional, isn't it?
SPEAKER_03It's quite weird that we do a podcast which talks about art and we don't see it.
SPEAKER_04So even if it guides people to a place where they can see it, but then they're informed.
SPEAKER_03We know how and why Ramon is doing what he's doing. So next time round, we've got another creativity coming up. Who's going to be our next guest? Do you know what?
SPEAKER_04I don't know for sure, but what I can say is it will be an exciting surprise. Woo-hoo. Bye for now, Adrienne bye for now, Harlan, and bye for everyone listening out there. Hi.
SPEAKER_02Bye. Creativity. If you think you're too old to be creative or too creative to be old, tune in to the Creativity Podcast.