rie
muñoz
A Unique Style
In the early 1970s, Jean Shadrach, founder of the Artique Gallery in Anchorage and an artist in her own right, managed a gallery in the Anchorage Historical and Fine Arts Museum. One day, the museum opened an exhibit of paintings by Rie Muņoz, and Shadrach noticed that everyone who was looking at her work was smiling." She thought, "I have to meet an artist who can have this effect on everyone."
Art dealers use virtually identical words when describing the appeal of Rie Muņoz art: "It makes people happy," they chorus. "It makes them feel good." Bill and Mary Lindsay bought their first Muņoz (a serigraph, Raft of Ducks, Plate 53 in POA) in 1979, the year after they opened Eastside Framing and Gallery in Olympia, Washington. They have since renamed their gallery to Gala~Rie. They now devote their entire wall space to Rie Muņoz prints. "People are just absolutely delighted with her things," they say. "They go through the bins and chuckle."
Although there is much humor in Rie's work, the figures in her paintings are themselves usually serious. Few smiles split even the children's faces. The sense of gaiety derives instead from the strong, bright colors; the imaginative style; and the subject matter. Rie has a Norman Rockwell-like ability to capture scenes from daily life that convey a sense of familiarity. People can look at an image and find their own stories. "That is part of the magic of Rie Muņoz," says Bill Lindsay. "Ten people can look at one of her images and see ten different things in it."
Many of the best-loved Rie Muņoz prints—Kara and Jacob (POA Plate 320), for example, an image of a toddler hugging a patient but worried looking Labrador retriever, or Six-Legged Spider (POA Plate 305), which shows three kids in a swing—share this quality of universality. Rie sketched In the Park, France (POA Plate 163), a small painting of an elderly couple sitting on a park bench with the signature Muņoz dog curled at their feet, in a hill town village in the south of France. But the collectors who admire the print don't necessarily focus on the location. "A little old man and a little old lady appeal to everyone," notes one gallery owner. "Rie really catches the human element."
Rie likes to paint "real" people doing "real" things, preferably in the out-of-doors. Although most of her work consists of "Alaska-type people doing Alaska-type things," she finds her subjects anywhere: along the canals of France, among the tulip fields of Mt. Vernon, Washington, even in a London pub. She paints scenery only as a backdrop, and she paints very few mechanical objects. Fishing boats, tugboats, ferries, canal boats—any work boats—engage her attention, but pleasure boats do not. Nor do airplanes. Even though bush aircraft qualify as true workhorses in Alaska, an airplane appears in only one Muņoz reproduction: Unloading Freight, Gambell (POA Plate 241). What interests Rie are not airplanes, but people.
And dogs. "Rie," quips artist Dale DeArmond, "has never met a dog she didn't like." An attentive observer can date Rie's paintings according to her canine companions of recent years, beginning with the shaggy brown-and-white Hindu, one of the congregated mutts awaiting their mistresses outside the Tenakee bathhouse in Ladies in the Bath (POA Plate 105). The telltale black body, white socks, and white tail tip identify Buddy-Pierre, a personable St. Bernard/lab mix who bounds through dozens of Muņoz prints, as does his successor, Muncie, a big yellow lab. Cats, by contrast—even Alaskan cats—being generally disinclined to participate in the sort of activities that Rie tends to paint, are nearly as scarce as airplanes in Muņoz paintings: a paltry four felines appear in the entire collection of published art.
Rie has enjoyed painting all kinds of birds, including "completely imaginary birds," all of her life. Their fluid lines and graphic markings lend themselves especially well to serigraphs, and Rie returns to bird themes—rafting ducks, flocking cranes, feeding geese—repeatedly. One of her own favorite works, Roosting Birds (POA Plate 172), shows an unlikely assembly of birds—cormorants, puffins, oystercatchers, and others—perched in an equally unlikely location: upon the back and antlers of a caribou. "I could easily have painted some birds in a field, which I don't think makes for an interesting painting," the artist reflects. "But I thought, 'Now how can I show a bunch of birds that is just kind of unreal?"' She tries not to portray things realistically. (Another bird serigraph, Some Alaskan Birds (POA Plate 159), shows an owl and a seagull balanced atop a Canada goose.)
EXPRESSIONISTIC .. Rie's 100-plus sketchbooks from more than thirty years of travels, all neatly labeled by place and date, occupy a sagging, four-foot shelf in a bookcase just off the living room of her Juneau house. She records whatever catches her eye: pots and pans hung merrily around a camp stove, a man leaning on a shovel, an old gas pump. Intended merely as memory aids, the sketches come perilously close to doodles. But with her former-cartoonist's eye, she can perfectly capture an attitude in a few spare lines. In the margins of the sketch, she may note such details as colors (which she usually ignores) and the precise wording of signs.
Weeks, months, or even years after a trip she takes out the sketchbook and maps out the painting she has in mind. Rather than attempting to replicate a scene exactly, she will try to "do something interesting with it," combining some elements from her sketches and rearranging others to make a compelling composition. "If you're just drawing accurately, that's really not very creative," she suggests. "Whereas if you take that accurate drawing and make it into an interesting composition—enlarge some aspects of it and omit others—then you're really enjoying yourself ... You are using your brain more than if you're just copying exactly from nature."
Rie paints in an "expressionistic" style, intentionally exaggerating and distorting to achieve the effects she seeks. Colors, for example, turn into extravagantly vivid displays (there being no room in a Muņoz painting for the "gray we all encounter in life"). In order to convey a mood, she will enlarge a setting sun into the towering inferno of Winter Sun, Gambell (POA Plate 62) or deepen an ordinary sky to "Muņoz blue," a sky of dreams and fairy tales (achieved by layering several shades of blue). She takes artistic license with perspective (which she admits she's not very good at anyway) in order to focus on the feeling of a place. Tents that in reality stand some distance apart will appear clustered together in her painting in order to symbolize "the closeness that exists in camps where everyone knows one another and works together." Her trees grow simpler in shape and less distracted with detail with each passing year. Stripped of branches, twigs, and leaves, her deciduous trees have been reduced to "clumps" and the evergreens to "inverted ice cream cones"—mere symbols of trees. (True creativity, Rie believes, lies in using symbols to represent reality.)
She loves to paint exaggerated motion and shapes. Her Eskimo ladies approach the spherical as they stoop to the ground picking berries. She paints wild swooping waves, bird wings, and laundry flapping in the wind— all interesting, active sights. For the same reason, she is fond of portraying people with their hands in the air ("a very graceful stance; an expression of beauty, like in ballet"). People hanging out laundry or putting fish to dry, and people waving hello or good-bye are favorite Muņoz motifs. Taking a cue from the Russian painter Marc Chagall, whose work she admires, she also paints people floating in the sky. There may be a theological rationale, such as the patron saint hovering above the Russian Church in St. Nicholas, Juneau (POA Plate 186). Or not. The children in Chasing Molting Geese (POA Plate 168) are simply having such a fine time they've gone airborne. She constantly quests for ways to make things more lively. Mermaids swim side-by-side with sea lions in her oceans. She paints faces purple or green, and gives people four fingers because they "seem to fit better on a hand than five. " No one seems to mind. But it takes a deliberate effort for Rie (a perfectly able draftsman) to subvert reality and create the fanciful images of a typical "Muņoz." A friend once climbed up to Rie’s studio and found her in the process of ripping up a painting. "I got carried away," said Rie sheepishly, holding up the shredded image of a "too-realistic" dog.
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munoz gallery 2101 N. Jordan Ave. Juneau, Ak 99801 800-247-3151 
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