URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2015_Melissa-McCarthy

Bob Dilworth Professor, Art

arts from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1976. But prior to coming to RISD, he’d never heard of the school. His mentor, Yasue Sakaoka, told him to apply to RISD. Mentors always played a part in Dilworth’s life. When he was thinking about applying to Northwestern University to get another art degree, it was Sakaoka who told him “No, you’re a painter. If you do this, you’ll be forced to write and research. You should be painting.” It was another milestone in terms of advice for Dilworth, who is hard pressed to identify his style of painting, which he says has evolved, as he has, throughout the years. “The closet thing you could say, without running the risk of categorizing or pegging it too tightly, is ‘new media,’” he says. He paints large scale, 87-by-67 inches, for the most part, calling it–meticulously composed human figures in homage

to the classical techniques of masters such as Caravaggio and Michelangelo. He says he does more collaging now; the process is all about the fabric, paper cutouts, stenciling, transferring images, and layering, the way it comes together, layer over layer. “If you say you’re this or that, you hold to a false model of who you are,” he says, pointing to the grand-sized paintings in his studio. “All the works you see here were seen at one point as completed, maybe several times. I come back and see something that could or should be done, or have a conversation with a friend who will say something that sets you in a new direction.” His work is handsome and complex, layers of stenciling and cutouts on original paintings. One is called “Margaret,”

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Spring | 2015 Page 49