BACK ROOM: Richard Ciccimarra (1924 - 1973)

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Richard Ciccimarra, "House in the Dominican", no date, watercolour on paper, 16” x 18.5”

Richard Ciccimarra, "House in the Dominican", no date, watercolour on paper, 16” x 18.5”

An urbane but troubled man, Richard Ciccimarra spent several years sailing in the West Indies with his first wife, Penny, before immigrating to Canada in the early 1950s. House in the Dominican, a watercolour at Petley-Jones Gallery in Vancouver, shows a simple one-storey white abode in a landscape of muted browns. An air of immediacy suggests it was done on site. “It’s quite powerful in its energy,” says Matt Petley-Jones.

The painting lacks the vibrant colour of many of the landscapes and florals Ciccimarra did based on his time in the West Indies, and hints at his darker side. His marriage, the first of three, was disintegrating amid his drinking and financial worries. Ciccimarra wasn’t particularly productive, according to biographer Frank Nowosad, but did keep a “rhapsodic journal” aboard the couple’s yacht, the Tern III.

Born into a wealthy family in Vienna, Ciccimarra was largely self-taught. His early influences included Moritz Daffinger, an Austrian botanical watercolourist, and Swiss artist Julius Bissier. He settled in Victoria, where his mother lived for a time, and in 1971 became a founding member, along with Maxwell Bates, Myfanwy Pavelic, Herbert Siebner, Robin Skelton and others, of an art group called the Limners, a term that refers to itinerant sign painters of the Middle Ages. The group had no single vision or doctrinaire philosophy, but its members were interested in figurative work.           

Ciccimarra’s third wife married him in 1966 and left him in 1970. “He was very prolific in Victoria,” says Vicky Husband. “I think he did his best work during his years here.” She says his melancholic nature was likely worsened by his wartime experiences, but recalls his intelligence, sense of humour and great love of fly-fishing.

Ciccimarra, whose work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, is known for large tissue collages on wood panels covered in beeswax. Skelton, writing in 1981 about the Limners, noted that Ciccimarra’s figures were insubstantial. “Ghost-like they express by their stances and gestures the solitude and mortality of man, and the tenuous nature of individuality. They are people on the very edge of dissolution, withdrawn, silent, alienated.”

Ciccimarra committed suicide in 1973 during a trip to Greece.