Drinking With Artists

New London painter Denny Rivera

Christopher Kepple

NEW LONDON – It’s the first actually cold day this winter – the buildings on Bank Street corral the early evening breeze, and it bites. Our target tonight is indeterminate. Booze and conversation are our goals.

It’s slow at the Dutch. Perfect for talk of love, work, god, wine, beer, drugs and art. Denny Rivera rests into a seat with a Corona, pack of light Marlboros. I choose a black and tan and Luckies in the breast pocket.

“I don’t call myself an artist,” Rivera says. “Everyone drives a car; but do they call themselves a driver?”

But Rivera currently has artwork hanging in galleries in New York and New London, including popular local bar the Oasis, where he has three portraits and two abstracts painted on halves of ping pong tables.

Denny’s is a familiar face to many in New London. Rivera was born in NL, lived in New York for a spell, and moved back to the Nutmeg state.

He landed in New York and spent much of his childhood there. His father left when he was 14 and the Big Apple was much for his mother to handle, since she was bred in a slow-paced Puerto Rican town.

He grew up rough, and his father’s vacancy created a dark hole for Rivera to crawl into. It was music and art that pulled him up and out.

“That was the darkest, and that’s when everything went to shit,” he said. From age 14 and into his early 20s, Rivera said he didn’t care about anything.

“I did a lot of fucked up stuff, but that’s all left behind,” he said, reluctant to name names (or indiscretions). “I did a lot of ignorant shit…I’m surprised I’m living today. I could be dead, I could be in jail.” Painting saved his life, he said.

There was a two-year period of his life where Rivera fell into a deep depression. He didn’t leave the house much, he lost social contact.

“I couldn’t move, I couldn’t live,” he said. “I wasn’t living.”

He read and he doodled, consuming art magazines and books on Picasso, Pollack, Callo.

“It used to keep me at a level where I felt sane,” he said.

He also discovered Station 58. “That place brought me to know there is a place to make art,” he said, and he began to take art seriously. He was meeting people with the same stripes. While his heritage is Puerto Rican – the kind most display on dashboards and car antennas – he represents his blood in everyday life, not on his car. He also has personal religious beliefs, his faith deeply rooted in a family Christian ritual, but he is not on track to convert the masses. He does think that some people could use a bit of faith.

“I’ve met a lot of people who never stepped in a church,” he said. “Some people have no hope; they’ve thrown in the towel. Times is hard, but you’ve got to believe. If you don’t believe, what’s left?” And marijuana is not a drug – Rivera said he feels pot is not a drug, but a substance that broadens horizons, open different doors. He considered himself a big pothead at one time but no longer smokes, he said, smiling and lifting his Corona. The only drug he needs to paint, he said, is his pain, his struggle.

“I did a lot of dirt, but I had a lot of heart,” he said.

Grafitti finds its way into his heritage as well, Rivera said, growing up in a predominately black and Hispanic Bronx neighborhood. He is disgusted at the criminalization of the true artists who have no legal spaces, no blank walls to express on.

“Some people have no hope, they’ve thrown in the towel. Times is hard, but you’ve got to believe. If you don’t believe, what’s left?”“It’s historic, so I try to keep some of it alive,” he said. “If you gave us a wall to express ourselves, I guarantee (illegal graffiti) wouldn’t be going on.” He recognizes there are some punks who just want the thrill of defacing, but it is certainly not a gang thing in a small town like New London.

“The kids who really want to start a movement, give them a wall,” he said. “These are individual artists, making a shout, making a call.”

Rivera’s paintings often include heavy, watery paint drips, the kind seen on hasty, raw graffiti. He allows the drip, often overwashing an area to make it drip.

“It’s just beautiful.”

He paints his feelings, he added, not trying to “replicate or imitate.” Art is in the color of the chopped parsley and the salmon while he cooks, and that helps craft a creative spark. By the time he gets home he is often thirsty to paint. When he doesn’t have money for canvas, he paints on wood.

“From pencil to fucking rock,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t have money for paint… .I’m broke still, but I’m happy.” His portraits, like the ones hanging at the Oasis, are of childhood television and music icons, the (mostly) deceased stars he grew up loving on the gleaming screen – Redd Foxx, Johnny Carson, Gil Scott-Heron, Jerry Lewis, Don Knotts and Woody Allen. Rivera, 30, just scored a new apartment on Bank Street – still virtually empty, save for some paintings already hung. Furniture takes a backseat to the canvas. He’s setting up a new nest, but he’s setting up to paint.

“It is nice to live that Picasso life,” he said. “But I know what it’s like to starve. That’s why I work.”

He worked for 12 years as a barber (and he even developed artistic style from cutting hair, he said). He now cooks at a seafood restaurant in Old Saybrook and details cars at a Nissan dealership. The most he ever sold a painting for was $800, he said, and that was a haggled price. Selling a $2,000 painting once a month is the pipe dream. But trading art is as good as selling, he added. The kind of customer that appreciates art like his is often the kind who cannot afford it. “All I want is for people to remember my work – my family, people who knew me,” he said. “Maybe I didn’t save a life, but maybe I inspired a life.”

If he could go back, though he never considered himself a school person, he thinks art school, or even cooking school, may have been a good choice to make in his twenties. If he could have turned out differently…

“I think I might have said fireman.”