? ?
[tic, tic, tic of metal tool on surface]
- The best art criticism comes from the proper perspective.
- These were the issue.
We were talking about that
the flags are not -- they work but they don't work.
- You need to understand where the artist is coming from,
but you can't be so close you don't see the flaws.
Rafael Francisco Salas understands that.
- I sit in this chair and I'm staring at the work
and trying to imagine myself
as a viewer who's never looked at the work before.
- As an art professor at Ripon College
and an art critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
he knows criticism is a part of the process.
- Some of this stuff is an error and I have to fix it.
- But good criticism requires some distance,
an outside perspective.
- So I ask the same questions:
What's working? What isn't working?
What's pretty? What's not pretty?
Is it smart? Is it really stupid?
- He uses a chair in his studio for reflection
and even uses a chair in his latest installation
to allow the audience to gain the proper perspective.
- So the idea is that one is sitting here
watching TV at one in the morning.
All those beers belong to the sitter.
- Rafael understands
not everybody will get the message in his artwork
and he acknowledges that by painting in pixelization.
- Everything we see is mediated by screens
so any time I use this and I use it a lot in my work,
I'm acknowledging the fact that paintings in our life
and our viewpoints are kind of glitchy.
? ?
- Rafael was seemingly born with an outsider s perspective.
- He just had a different way of looking at the world.
- Barb Salas remembers her son as mostly happy,
growing up on a farm outside Ripon.
- He was always living in his own...
very much living in your own world.
- Yeah, I always felt very internal.
I was always thinking about something else.
- Rafael takes much of his inspiration from rural America
but it's not about sunsets and wheat fields.
His artist s statement
talks about a "dream continually beyond reach."
- My own moods and my own outlook on life is often --
there's a darkness there.
And so my art work has always, sort of
reflected an element of bleakness or sadness.
- Rafael explains that
with a white mother and a Mexican-American father,
he struggled to find his identity.
- But I have to say a mixed race identity is hard.
It's hard to sort of know.
Do I have an authentic view of Mexican culture?
Do I have an authentic view of rural white culture?
And the answer is yes and no.
I don't assume that
the rural white community gets what I'm doing necessarily.
And I don't assume that
the Mexican-American community gets it either.
? ? [country music]
- He found comfort
in the country music his father listened to.
? ? [country music]
- As a five-year-old kid,
I'd be listening to murder ballads
by Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.
So I'm using them.
I'm kind of recreating album covers.
So this is Willie Nelson's "Red Headed Stranger" kinda redone.
I always liked country music.
My work always had a certain kind of darkness
and I realized at some point that
these country music artists were
trying to describe a rural experience
and I was trying to describe a rural experience.
- Musicians are a recurring motif.
- If a barn could sing or if the sheep could sing
or if the country or the landscape could sing,
what would be the song or who would be singing?
So these are kind of archetypes
for the land and rural culture in general.
- After high school,
Rafael needed to leave rural Wisconsin
to gain the proper perspective.
So it was in New York City that Rafael started painting barns.
- I started to reconnect with Wisconsin
while I was in the middle of Brooklyn, New York,
and that creative distance I think was really good for me.
- Eventually life led him back
to Wisconsin and to Ripon College.
- It's something I tell my students as well.
I think it's really important to leave a place of comfort
and to find a way to remove yourself from what s known.
? ?
[woof]
- Rafael still returns to his mother's sheep farm to help out.
[baaa]
- I'm still inspired by the landscape and its moods.
? ?
- Immersed in art,
Rafael is comfortable with who he is
and his own perspective.
- My work just sort of comes from this world view
and it s how I see it.
You know I try to make work that is truly beautiful
but I also understand that that's not --
it's not going to necessarily reach everybody.