Richard has now branched out from his bread-and-butter work – though is not neglecting the high-end print work, like Time Magazine, that is the backbone of the company – to form Art On A Grand Scale. Read the interview and enjoy the pictures, and you will end up with a full understanding of what they do and how it can energise and revitalise otherwise dead space in your casino or hotel complex.

Casino International: How did the idea for the new business come to you?

Richard Solomon: There has been a number of revolutions of late that have affected the core of our business; we have what we call the digital revolution, there's the stock revolution and we have – for want of a better term – the dumb revolution. Digitally, clients can find things faster. With stock, there are these huge libraries of imagery; if you want a girl on a beach you can find the image. And then you have the art directors and creative directors who have come out of school with a lack of understanding and passion for really good art. These factors started to impact on the level of my business and as a side bar to that I was starting to get what I called 'oddball calls'. I was getting calls circuitously from people who said "I love your artists, could that person do a large piece in a particular space?" Now the client assumed that the artist would paint the piece to that scale, but think about the limitations of a professional artist. If you work in say, pastel then you have a finite spatial environment that you feel comfortable working. Put a piece of chalk in your hand and you really would be uncomfortable working bigger than 2x2 feet or 3x3 feet. So these calls were intriguing but they were somewhat on a level of absurdity and I started to think, what about taking art, high-end art, and what if there was a possibility of fabricating it? If you look at a major metropolitan area, you see buses have been wrapped and billboards are all over the place. The technology is there. It's not revolutionary, but evolutionary to go from an advertisement for Sony or a shaving cream, to taking true art and putting it in a large space if you can find the right client who thinks that that will upscale their environment. So that's what drove this idea; I made some calls and got contacts and it took a long time for me to make sure that this was a viable business, a potential business since it didn't exist as an agency before. It's not that fabricated murals have not been done before as they certainly have, and artists have taken their work out to, for instance large galleries and museums and they've blown them up, but the idea of a developer for instance or in your case a casino, who would have the vision to say "I don't have to put some huge monstrosity up that's going to cost a fortune and not be very stimulating. There's no eye candy there, how about putting a 60, 80 or 100ft piece of art?" Now you can break down that art into various categories. It could be decorative in nature, using the term abstract expressionist at the one end of the spectrum or it could be content driven. We have 30+ artists worldwide who can fill almost any requirement from totally decorative to totally story-driven in various techniques. They can be done efficiently, as the artist is going to work to scale and they're not going to disturb your lobby with a scaffold that's going to be up for six months to a year. You're not going to have to house six painters for six months and you're not going to have to feed them for six months. You could close that space down for the weekend and the crew can come in on Friday and it will be up by Monday. That was the genesis of how this idea has evolved. We are now in a position to show people what we do and how we do it and along the way we have created 30-40 jobs so far. Now we're reaching out to people in Zurich or the Arab Emirates, or wherever your building is and saying 'did you know that this is possible? Did you know that there is a source?' – and I'm it.

CI: How is it done then? What's the physical process?

RS: It's the equivalent of high-end wallpaper. Basically the commission will work like this, for example, a Native American casino, could come to us and say, we have a spatial environment and it's 60 x 20 feet, so the aspect ratio is 3 to 1. In simple terms the artist has to know he's working 3 to 1, that means 3ft by 1ft or what ever mix of that 3 to 1 ratio he feels comfortable working in. They then look at the 33 artists I represent, we work together to choose the right person. Now let's say the Native American casino is of a particular tribe, they want to have this mural so it pays homage to that particular tribe, so it has to be historical and content-driven. I might advise them on the artists best-equipped to do the job, then they choose one of those people. I talk to that artist and we get a schedule together and obviously as their agent I have to price the job, so I take into account how much time it's going to take, how complex it is and how prestigious the commission. Also prices are reflective of secondary and tertiary usage, which means the customer can sell posters in the gift shop and do menus or whatever they want. So you come up with a formula that solves the creative fee. Now you go into the fabrication and installation. We have a good working relationship with a company called MDC Wallcoverings, they're a huge company in Chicago. The first step is to take the art which is relatively small – assume that it's 3 feet by 1 – and you make a high-resolution scan of the art. So the art now becomes the true art, the painting in pastels or oils becomes irrelevant to this project. The only relevance that the true art has is if the client says I love this art so much I want to put the original in my corporate offices. Then I would negotiate the cost for the original art. But in reality, well, the scan is the reality.

We then send the scan to MDC Wallcoverings and they talk to the architect of the building it's for and get the facts about the site. They want to know what the surface is, what the component of the surface is, is it indoor or outdoor. Here's an example. At the moment, we are doing a project in Sri Lanka for a village that was taken out by the tsunami. A developer is working with the United Nations to put up a school and we're going to be doing a mural, but it's outdoors. Now this company, MDC Wallcoverings, want to know what the surface is going to be and what the humidity is like, and where the sun is going to come from and how strong it is, so they can take into account and make sure it's graffiti proof and it's UV protected, and if it's a rainy environment, all of these factors would be taken into account. They can then adhere it directly to the wall, or build a frame for it. Once those facts are ascertained he will then come back to me and say, "Richard, here's the factors that you have to build into your estimate." So the estimate for the Native American casino, our example, includes all these factors to get a finished job. We have to ascertain what the client needs. Maybe he only needs it up for a year and then he wants to change the subject matter. Well, you can just literally peel this one off. That's the beauty of the fabricated mural that it is not the Sistine Chapel, it can be semi-permanent, 10-15 years, or it can come down very quickly. The other thing if you look at it from the other complete point of view, say I was doing something for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame here in the USA and they said we are going to honour Bruce Springsteen, so we need something for two days, I can do that. The longevity doesn't matter just as long as you get the facts. The other thing that's so interesting is that the texture of the surface can be changed, so if you want something that looks like a painting or you want a relief style, or three-dimensional quality, similar to a giclée, you can do that. You can fool the public to the extent that they have to walk up and touch the thing to see that it was fabricated. People don't know that the mural was blown up from a 1 by 3 painting. Another factor I haven't mentioned yet is insurance, people want to know that this thing is not going to fall off the wall onto someone's head. I don't joke about that – if it's outdoor, or indoors in a space that's heavily trafficked you have to make sure there's no liability here, that's where the company you deal with have to give guarantees.

CI: What current installations have you done, anything

well-known?

RS: The thing that we are most famous for to date is in Barnes and Noble, they have over 500 stores both in urban and surburban environments. They are as common in the States as Starbucks and they have dominated the book market. I was approached as these stores were beginning to introduce a space for patrons to have a cup of coffee or a sandwich, and they said to me they wanted something above that space, which are all varying dimensions within the many stores. They wanted a mural of 19th and 20th century authors. For them we suggested our artist Gary Kelly, he's a very well known illustrator who has a Cubist quality to his work and he did these spectacular murals. We have also worked for the Caterpillar Corporation, in their offices, and Anderson Windows, one of the largest glass manufacturers in the world. When they put up a new building they wanted story-telling art for their atrium and we created a mural for that space. We also did a portrait of Abraham Lincoln for the Presidential Library inSpringfield, Illinois, and have just done a traveling exhibit sponsored by the National Geographic, which is moving from Cincinnati, Ohio to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, it's is six very large panels that are of pirates. Our projects vary from illustrative to, well, art for art's sake.

CI: How do you see the business growing?

RS: I hope to grow the agency to 50 or even 100 artists. I have a mix of illustrators, fine artists, and a couple of photographers now, one of whom is James Bleecker, who is what we call a Hudson River School photographer, and Lev Nisnevitch who does surreal imagery.

I think I have a good eye for quality and talent, and I've picked a group of people who are at the apex of what they do professionally so no-one is going to get second-rate crap from us!

CI: It must be great to work in a field you are passionate about.

RS: I actually love art; a lot of people who are agents in this business, they could be selling shoes to be perfectly blunt. I grew up in a home where my Dad was an art collector, so it's in the blood – I really feel that I'd like to see really great art in really big spaces, it doesn't have to be a museum. We have plenty of museums, but what we don't have is these large spaces which are desperate for some uplifting fabulous art and I hope to make a living doing this. What would make me very proud would be walking into a casino or a bank, a public space and seeing some art that makes me say, "that's cool, wow! It's intriguing." And I hope the owner of the space is forward thinking enough to say, "This reflects well on me, because I want my guests to think I have another side of myself, not just to make money".

If it's bought in a cynical manner or a very conscientious manner, then the guy who comes in with his wife, he might not have seen too much art before and he might come away saying, "This is intriguing stuff", and that's what really turns me on about what I do – and I think that's why I can be passionate about it. This is not space age technology, what's new about it is the applicability and that's revolutionary, it gets the art into places that need a visual tonic, so to speak.

www.artonagrandscale.com

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