✦ Teeny Tiny Paintings
This week I want to share some of the paintings Riley has been working on. He currently has a painting in the Teeny Tiny Art Show at the Oceanside Museum of Art, the show is a fundraiser where artists create 5” x 5” pieces and every piece is sold anonymously for $25. All proceeds support OMA’s arts education programs, funding classes, workshops, and creative opportunities for students in the community.
Over the last year he has started creating these small paintings of quiet desert scenes, featuring simple shapes with bright colors. This week after work we sat down together and I asked him some questions about his art and process.
What got you into painting?
Honestly, it was the physical part of it. Getting away from the computer and doing something with my hands. Painting feels quick and immediate, you can get an idea out without overthinking. Just doing something tangible is really nice.
What inspires these paintings?
Friends like Joey (check out Joey Belardi’s art here) have really inspired me, especially the way they reference cartoon backgrounds. I’ve always loved the background artwork in shows like The Simpsons, those scenic landscapes that are super simple but still feel so atmospheric (check out Scenic Simpsons on Instagram).
There’s something about that style that I’m really drawn to: the simplicity, the flatness, the strong color contrast. The way a scene can feel so vast and emotional, even though it’s built from just a few shapes and gradients.
It’s kind of the same thing I’m thinking about in my own paintings. Treating the landscape in layers, like the sky is one layer, the mountains are another, and then the little human elements sit on top. It’s minimal, but it still tells a story.
There’s also an artist I love who does these really minimal desert night landscapes, kind of Western, kind of fine art. I’m terrible with names, but I think my work lives somewhere in that mix: cartoon simplicity, desert stillness, and then the human presence tucked into it.
A lot of your paintings have these small lights, human structures, or signs in the distance. Tell me about the human elements and why you mix those in?
I’m always playing with adding human elements into nature. Even in the landscapes, there’s usually a road or something that shows interaction.
I like the juxtaposition. The vastness of something so natural, like the desert, or even the world, and then humans, these little dots, these little lights that are just like a speck of dust in the grand scheme of things.
What materials are you using right now?
I’ve been experimenting. I started with gouache and watercolor, and now I’m getting into acrylic - it might be a better medium for what I want.
Right now I love watercolor for backgrounds, because you get that natural gradation. Then I like layering darker elements on top with something thicker, like gouache or acrylic, for contrast. Japanese watercolors have been my favorite lately. I like building up thick color in the brush instead of watering everything down.
What do you want to paint in the future?
I want to keep things small, and I like that scale. I hope to keep playing with acrylic because it’s cheaper, and you can build flat layers more easily. Watercolor is harder, you have to wait forever between layers, but I still want to keep working with it too.
Subject-wise, I want to try more real-life scenarios, but still simplified. Like the Oceanside area, the mountains, the airport, everyday scenes reduced down into shapes.
This work makes me want to go on more night road trips and get inspiration, go across the country.
It brings that nostalgia back for me… like when I was younger we used to do road trips to Colorado. We would go through Vegas and see all those lights out in the distance, and it’s like, what’s going on over there? It’s just kind of cool.
