The Kind of Artist Who Ruined Blank Walls
Every artist I’ve ever loved has been a little bit annoying about it. Give them a bare wall, a napkin, the margin of a receipt, and it stops being blank. Chris Rigano was one of the good annoying ones, the kind of friend who couldn’t leave a surface alone and made you glad he didn’t.
I’m not going to pretend I have the whole story of Chris Rigano the artist here. What I have is the loss of Chris Rigano the friend, and that’s a different kind of writing than the travel posts I usually put up on this site. So this one’s shorter, and it’s not about a place. It’s about a person, and the fact that he isn’t here to argue with me about art anymore.
What Art Is For
I’ve written before about people who couldn’t leave a space the way they found it. The friends who turned a stretch of jungle wall into a canvas because it felt like the right thing to do that day, or the guy who bought an entire abandoned mansion in Las Vegas just to let people paint on it until it fell down. Chris belonged in that company. He understood something I only half get, that art isn’t precious, it’s a way of being awake in a place, and the making matters more than the keeping.
That’s the thread I keep pulling on this week. Not the specifics, which are his to have owned and mine to still be sorting through, but the fact that he made things, and the things he made were an argument for paying attention to the world instead of just passing through it.
Rest Easy, Chris
I don’t have a tidy way to close this out, and I’m not going to fake one. Chris Rigano was my good friend, and the world has one less person in it who could make a blank wall nervous. I’ll miss him plainly and without much grace about it, which feels like the honest way to say it rather than the polished one.
Rest easy, Chris. Thanks for ruining so many blank walls.
